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Field Work: An interview with Jenna Butler

Jenna Butler was born in Norwich, England in 1980, but has spent most of her life on the prairies of Western Canada.  Her work has garnered a number of awards, including the James Patrick Folinsbee Prize, and has been produced by the CBC. Her poetry has appeared a number of books, anthologies and periodicals.  Butler is the author of three short collections of poetry, Forcing Bloom, weather, and Winter Ballast, in addition to a new trade collection from NeWest Press, Aphelion.

Butler’s work will also be featured in the upcoming WONK7 and in person as she reads with fellow poet Glen Sorestad in Wetaskiwin on October 7. In anticipation of this occasion, WONK’s Jonathan Meakin talked to Jenna about poetry, publishing and the challenges of doing both in rural Alberta.

WONK: Writer, editor, publisher, scholar, instructor – clearly, there is much that keeps you busy. Do you see these roles as complementary and/or interrelated?

JB: Most definitely interrelated. I’m very fortunate to be able to teach within my discipline, creative writing; I’ve taught English for several years at high school and university levels, but there’s something about teaching creative writing specifically that allows me to bring the enthusiasm I feel, as a writer experimenting in her craft, to the classroom. I’m finding the teaching and practice of creative writing mutually enriching.

I’ll also happily admit to being what they call a professional student. I find I am most excited about teaching when I am concurrently learning something new. I’m very close to completing my PhD, and after I’ve given myself a bit of downtime following the defense, I’ve got some further courses picked out that I want to run with! (Nothing to do with literature; I want to spend some time learning about herbal medicine.) But I don’t think I could function quite right as a teacher if I wasn’t simultaneously being pushed as a student. I’m in that same actively engaged mindset (and I’m also more aware of the time stresses that students experience).

As an editor, I feel very privileged to have worked with a huge range of poets from around the world. That’s exposed me to a vast pool of very diverse writing, and just as that impacts the scope of the little poetry press I run, it’s certainly impacted me as a writer. It’s an honor to read such a variety of manuscripts. Yes, some aren’t quite as polished as they need to be, but there are a lot of gems out there, too. That’s reaffirming as both a writer and an editor. I love to encounter new work, as a poet, that absorbs and challenges me. If I have the chance to act as editor for such a collection, well, that’s the icing on the cake, and I get to have fantastic, in-depth discussions with poets whose work I really admire.

WONK: With three chapbooks (Forcing Bloom, weather, and Winter Ballast) already to your credit, your first trade collection, Aphelion, was published by NeWest this year. How have you enjoyed these different modes of publishing? Have the expectations – yours? the publishers? the literary community? – been different?

JB: I really love the chapbook format — the “taster” nature of it, the immediacy. You get to leave your readers (all going well!) wanting more. It’s a perfect format for learning how to refine a series, to polish and cut until the bones are where they need to be and there’s no unnecessary excess. There’s no room for poems that aren’t quite working with the rest of the series. In many ways, the chapbook experience was invaluable in the creation of the manuscript for NeWest; I was a great deal more aware of how tight I needed to make the collection and how I wanted to structure it. And the first book experience was amazing. That’s thanks in no small part to the folk at NeWest, who have been fabulous from day one. I’ve been really happy just to learn what I can as I go along, about both the publication and promotion processes, and to take up experiences and opportunities as they’re offered. For instance, I was absolutely honored to launch Aphelion with Robert Kroetsch, as he celebrated the launch of his latest collection Too Bad: Sketches Toward a Self-Portrait. I was also invited to read with the wonderful Bert Almon, and now there’s the WONK reading/launch with Glen Sorestad, another poet I have long read and admired. There have been these gifts all the way through the first book process. It’s been about staying open to experiences and being grateful for the support of the literary community around me.

WONK: You are also the founding editor of Rubicon Press. Do you view your work as a chapbook publisher as an expression of your artistic practice or something else entirely? (And feel free to trouble that easy recourse to an either/or binary.)

JB: Glad you said it, because I’m going to land squarely in the middle of the binary here. Part of what I founded Rubicon Press to do was to work with the poets I publish to create the books the poets had in mind when they wrote their respective manuscripts. We all do that — we all imagine how we’d like things laid out, images that have influenced our manuscripts, colours, textures, etc. I work with poets to make these ideas a reality. That can mean discussing the nitty-gritties of paper texture, colour, weight, font, ink type, etc. It can also mean working one-on-one with a photographer or artist who has donated images for the chapbook. So it’s not really all my own artistic practice. Sure, I bring my own ideas to the table, but it’s not about me.  I want to engage in a dialogue with the poets I work with, the back-and-forth of creating something meaningful together. There’s a great dynamic in that.

WONK: Although your family emigrated from England when you were a child, you have remained active in literary, academic, and publishing communities on both sides of the Atlantic. What fuels your efforts to maintain and deepen your connection to both Canada and England?

JB: Many things. As a small-press editor, there’s so much good poetry out there. There are a number of writers in Europe doing fabulous things, and I want to immerse myself in their work. Kathleen Jamie. Matthew Hollis. Denise Riley. So many more. I want to read additional work like theirs and eventually get into publishing more of it, if I can.

My time at the University of East Anglia, during the year my husband and I lived in Norwich while I was completing my MA, introduced me to a very supportive and innovative academic community. I didn’t want to lose touch with that UK community when I moved back home to Edmonton, and so I’ve striven to maintain contact in terms of taking part in both conferences and readings overseas. I’ll be back in England again in the spring.

I’ll always choose to live in Canada, though. I love the literary scene in Alberta; in Edmonton especially — it’s deeply supportive and encourages writers from a number of different genres and groups to get together and form community.

Finally, my husband and I run a small organic farm here in Alberta during the summers, and much of my writing comes down to a deep connection to the landscapes that ground me. I might live away from the people and places that are home to me for short periods of time, but I’ll never choose to move permanently.

WONK: Aphelion offers two groups of poems under the headings ‘Europe’ and ‘North America’. Would you like to comment on these groupings as a structural or thematic principle?

JB: Each section was written in the opposite place: I wrote the ‘North America’ section while living in Norwich and the ‘Europe’ section once I’d returned to Canada. I found the old saying true: it’s much easier to see clearly at a remove. Trying to write about a place while living in it didn’t work for me, but writing about it in absentia was very generative.

The poems in ‘North America’ are different from the ‘Europe’ section in both structure and content, though all the poems in the book, in some way, connect to the theme of finding/building home. The poems in ‘North America’ abstain from a recognizable rhyme scheme and flirt with breath and form — in particular, the anti-ghazal, à la Phyllis Webb. There’s a great receptivity in Canada to poetry that plays with form and sound, and the ‘North America’ section of the book reflects this openness.

In contrast, the ‘Europe’ section contains more internal rhyme, a gesture back to the centuries of literary tradition that ground poetry there. This section makes reference to Greek myth and legend and connects to the varied landscapes of Europe that I feel I am just beginning to know.

WONK: There are many resonant images and ideas throughout Aphelion. The close of “Salt Spring Island”, a poem dedicated to the memory of Lilo Berliner and Wilson Duff, still haunts me with its evocation of a paradoxical form of sight:

i begin to see you
less clearly     more truly

Does this perspective inform your recovery of the lives of women featured in your new sequence, “Lepidopterists”?

JB: Absolutely. So much of my writing is focused on the little-known story, the tale forgotten or buried. In “Salt Spring Island,” I am referring both to the way in which we oversimplify our perceptions of others, and the far too simple view of suicide as an unvoicing (Lilo Berliner killed herself by walking into the sea, but challenged this concept of suicide as silence by leaving her correspondence between her and her friend, a previous suicide, on Phyllis Webb’s doorstep). Thus, the oversimplified view as untrue, as too easy.

In “Lepidopterists,” I look at a number of women in Western Canada whose stories are either relatively little known by the general public or completely buried in time. During the writing process, the more I read and listened to the stories of these women, the more I realized that there were layers upon layers there in the telling. There were women whose traditional ways of life were being destroyed, whose entire sense of identity was being rewritten by an incoming patriarchal settler culture. There were immigrant women who were expected to create “home” for their husbands and families, but who struggled bitterly with what “home” meant when all property was in the man’s name and it was often the man who was acknowledged as having a deeper and more visible connection to the land he was working. So many paths, so many stories, overwriting each other, layering each other out.

WONK: I have the impression that considerable research in areas as diverse as botany, ecology, geology, entomology, etc. informs your work. Is this research a conscious activity? Or is it simply a matter of voracious reading and a hunger to understand and represent the physical, cultural, and political landscapes to which you are drawn coming together as an unconscious activity?

JB: It’s a bit of both. I read a lot, and widely, across a number of genres and subjects. I’ve loved being outdoors since I was a child, and between years of backcountry hiking, camping, gardening, and now the farm, I’ve devoured many hundreds of texts on diverse elements of the outdoors. My grandfather made his living as a gardener and a great deal of his interest in the outdoors rubbed off on me: the studies of botany and ecology are second nature. I’d been perking on the idea of writing something like the “Lepidopterists” series for years, ever since reading Nabokov’s Butterflies and beginning to understand how Nabokov perceived himself as a lepidopterist first and a writer second; as attached to the natural world first, and as a recorder of that connection second. So many of the stories in that book are tied to his own childhood in Russia — I began to imagine how that connection to lepidoptery and the sense of “opening a landscape” through the capture of specimens for study might be different on the Canadian prairies; might apply to women. And so there was research involved there to connect the different species of butterfly from the various prairie zones to the corresponding prairie women who lived approximately during the same era as each butterfly’s discovery. In that case, research came before writing — it had to, to correctly inform the poems.

WONK: Would you like to comment on your writing process?  Do you begin with quickly written rough hewn drafts? Or do you do other, more exploratory forms of writing as a way of finding your way in/through/around ideas or images you may be mulling over?

JB: My writing process is erratic. I can’t claim to be one of those disciplined few who sit down to write X number of minutes per day. Having written for years, I find that daily practice isn’t my rhythm, and I don’t produce work I want to keep that way. I spend a lot of time filling up on the things that drive me: being outdoors, working with my hands, listening to music, reading. And then, when I feel that I’m full up and can’t function without sitting down to write, I write. I have to. I make the time.

I always jump right into drafts, and — cardinal sin! — I only write on the computer. I save right over top of old drafts and keep on going. It drives writer friends crazy. But I am fascinated by the concept of writing the “I” out of my work, of creating poems that can stand on their own as literature without needing “me” in there to tell my singular story. If I use “I,” it tends to morph, to become less a definite identity and more an amalgamation of stories I’ve been told, people I’ve met, etc.  And so I write using a keyboard, not a pen and paper — I don’t even want to see my own handwriting when I’m drafting poetry.

Photography is, for me, a form of pre-writing, as is playing music. I noodle my way through ideas and images on the piano quite frequently before sitting down to write. I have synaesthesia, and so sound, colour, and shape are strongly connected to my writing.

WONK: Any reader of your work will likely note your references to Denise Riley. Would you like to discuss your influences and who you are reading now?

JB: Yes, Denise is a good friend and mentor. Until her recent retirement, she was also my PhD supervisor. I deeply respect her work, its layered, imagistic richness and the way in which it accretes, building upon previous works of literature. She is most definitely an influence.

I’m reading now — and always, in cycles — Phyllis Webb, especially the anti-ghazals in Water and Light. Di Brandt — Now You Care and So this is the world and here I am in it. Douglas Barbour, especially the breath ghazals in Breath Takes. Newlove, continually. And the work of my peers! I think there is a tendency to get caught up in experienced writers and to forget or be wary of the writers of one’s own generation. I’m reading Angela Carr and Angela Rawlings — brave, beautiful stuff, gorgeous breath work. Also Gregory Betts’ The Others Raisd in Me. I so respect what he’s done; the sense of play, the sheer scope of the (as he calls it) plunderverse.

And outside poetry! Always, for the balance. A reread of Brian Brett’s Trauma Farm, for the wry humour in it and the love of the land that resonates with me in my own feeling of walking our farm. C. J. Cherryh’s Regenesis; I adore tightly-written sci-fi. And, as of yesterday, Harvest, a new series of short plays by Ken Cameron. Brilliant stuff, and not just the way he’s captured farm life. But that’s darn good, too.

WONK: On October 7, 2010, you will be reading with Glen Sorestad in Wetaskiwin, Alberta. Is it fair to say that poetry as a practice along with poets & poetry readers as communities are more often than not located in and focused on larger urban centres?  Organizations such as the League of Canadian Poets and the Writers’ Guild of Alberta, for example, have certainly facilitated live readings throughout Alberta, but those have been infrequent. What more can be done to bring poetry readings to rural Alberta? And what, in your view, are the benefits of poetry readings/performance in general?

JB: I think you’re right: generally, poetry events, communities, and readers are most often located in larger urban centres. I think this is a result of accessibility: most of the well-known poets on tour come to the larger cities, and the cities themselves often have greater budgets for hosting literary events.

There is funding available through the various granting, agencies, however, for hosting visiting poets in a wide variety of communities, and I think this is a great opportunity for rural communities or smaller centres to bring in guest writers.

I think the issue is mostly a question of forging connections within Alberta’s writing community. I know of friends, all poets, who have recently read in small towns across the province — just by virtue of knowing people in those particular communities and accepting invitations to come out and read. So connection is really key.

A great number of writers meet and connect through the League of Canadian Poets listserv; it might be neat to see if, at some point, a local listserv of Alberta writers could be created, which would allow for a more focused sense of community connection within the literary scene in this province. A number of writers use the Internet as a tool in their daily practice; it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to use something like a local listserv to discuss current writing issues and practice, inform writers of events or readings across the province, and act as a communication centre where writers can contact other writers to invite them to come into town for readings.

The benefits of poetry readings and performances in general are many and varied. I’m a big believer in poetry readings being an extension of poetic practice: it’s one thing to write the work and hope that people read it in book form and connect with it, but it’s another thing entirely to bring your own work, through a reading, off the page and to life for a roomful of people. We get so close to our own work that we lose the ability to see whether it’s effective or not. A reading in front of a roomful of people will provide that instant feedback; as a writer, you can sense if the audience is with you, is walking along with your words, or not.

And again, readings are a way for diverse communities to access and really forge connections with a writer. You can do a lot through technology to create connections, but being there in person to read, to mingle, to respond to questions? That’s key.

WONK: Thank you, Jenna.

— Interview by Jonathan Meakin

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Marita Dachsel on Poetry, Parenting, Polygamy and Writers Behaving Badly

Marita Dachsel (By: Sheryda Warrener)

The life of a writer and that of a mother intersect in many ways; in some aspects, one has become nearly as central to our definition of humanity as the other and, yet, the process of each remains predominantly entrenched in the private sphere of life. Marita Dachsel is living proof that simply because parenting and poetry tend to happen primarily in the private sphere, one need not come completely at the expense of the other.

In her latest collection, Glossolalia, Dachsel brings to the public, in poetry, the private thoughts of thirty-four different women as she reanimates the wives of Joseph Smith, the founder of the church of Latter Day Saints. Preceding Glossolalia, Dachsel’s poetry has been widely published, including the full length collection, All Things Said and Done, which was shortlisted for a ReLit award. Recently WONK had the privilege and fortune to ask Marita a few questions about her latest work and the process of living and writing that helped bring her to it.

WONK: Sometimes when I come home after a long day away, I see spinning within my wife’s eyes all of the chaos that unfolded during her day at home with our two kids. As a self labelled ‘mother of boys’, how does the inevitable chaos of parenthood slip into your poetry and, when it does, is it usually something that you embrace or is it something that tugs at your sleeve, pulling you from your writing, asking for another peanut butter sandwich? How do you balance the world of mother and writer?

Dachsel: So far, the chaos hasn’t entered my writing. The chaos has prevented me from writing many times, but when I have the time and space to write, I don’t let it in.

I’m still in the trenches of early motherhood, so there is no such thing as balance. Time to write is incredibly precious and can feel to be incredibly rare, although that is changing. Before becoming a mother, I was clueless to how much time I had and how I completely squandered it. But once my first son was born, I panicked and feared I’d never write again. Carving out writing time became essential for my sanity, and I’d get it when I could. At times it would simply be revising a poem while nursing. Last year, thanks to the amazing gift that is the Norwood Child and Family Resource Centre, I had two afternoons each week to write. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but a regularly blocked time like that was a godsend.

My husband is very supportive. He’s also a writer and understands not only the need for time and space, but also that the writing process is much more than getting words on paper—staring off into space doesn’t have to be justified. I have been very fortunate that Kevin is able to be so flexible with his work. At times, I’d get a day or two to just write while he parented full-time. If I wasn’t married to a writer, it would have been impossible to attend the Banff Writing Studio last spring for five weeks when my boys were one and three. I wrote more in those five weeks than I had the previous three years. But now that Kevin’s contract at the university is over and I’ve been very fortunate to get a grant, we’ve switched roles. He’s the stay-at-home parent and I get to write. We’re both excited about the change.

WONK: I read an interview from 2007 in which you mentioned that you had yet to become an Edmontonian. Now, two and a half years later, do you feel like you have become a local or are you still somewhere on the outside, looking in? What are the major differences between being a Vancouver poet and being/becoming an Edmonton poet? What is it that defines each experience for you?

Dachsel: Edmonton has been very welcoming. It is a city full of kind and generous people, and I’ve been able to elbow my way into a small place in the poetry community. Despite this, I still don’t feel like a local. It took me about seven years of living in Vancouver before I could confidently call myself a Vancouverite. Edmonton and Vancouver are very different cities, so I don’t think it would take seven years here, but I know I’m not there yet.

Because Edmonton is a smaller city than Vancouver, there is more fluidity between the camps and poets here truly do go to everything despite the type of poetry one writes. I’ve been exposed to much more spoken word, sound and experimental poetry than I had in Vancouver. It’s not that it doesn’t exist there, it’s just that there are so many more events happening in Vancouver that you can be very active in the community and still choose not to attend those events. It was very easy to become complacent.

I was very comfortable in Vancouver. Almost all my friends there were writers or theatre artists, and most of my writer friends I had made through the UBC Creative Writing program. I didn’t have to work to find community or a place in the city. When we moved to Edmonton we didn’t know anyone and I had to seek out like minded people.

Moving to Edmonton has been incredible for my writing. My writing has improved exponentially and it’s thanks to a cocktail of new opportunities (the arts are blessedly and generously supported here), the isolation of not knowing anyone initially, and being exposed to new artists and ideas. The city has been great to me.

WONK: I have been enjoying several of the interviews from your Motherhood and Writing project and have found so many of the responses to be incredibly honest and complex. With that in mind, I have decided to lift one of your own questions and turn it back on you: Did you always want to be a writer? A mother? How does the reality differ from the fantasy?

Dachsel: Thank you! I’ve really enjoyed it, too. Those women are so smart.

My mother kept a scrapbook type of book that chronicled my public education. Every school year I was to check what I wanted to be when I grew up and almost always I chose “author” (although architect, fireman, and lawyer were also chosen at times). When I was very young, I didn’t know what that really meant. I knew that I loved books and wanted to write books so I wrote stories all the time, but what the actual life of a writer was continued to be a complete mystery until I became an adult.

Similarly, I always knew I’d have a family. When I was young, it was just a given with not much thought behind it. I’d go to university; I’d be a mother. When I became an adult, I never, ever fantasized about babies. I’d imagine a large table with lots of kids around it sharing food and stories, and I’d long for it. I still do. I hope when my boys are older there will be afternoons that live up to that fantasy. I think it’s reachable.

Both writing and motherhood are given a false veneer in society. The writing life is portrayed as glamorous and passionate, when the reality is sitting alone at a desk for a long, long time doubting yourself almost every step of the way. It’s a job with long hours and little reward. Motherhood is supposed to be full of beautiful nurturing moments backlit by golden sunshine with flitting butterflies and chirping birds. In reality there are soiled diapers, meltdowns, sleep depravation, and again, a lot of self-doubt.

WONK: In some of your latest work, including the piece published in WONK, you have showcased and extended the stories of the wives of Joseph Smith, the polygamist founder of the Mormon church. Where did your interest in these women originate and have any of the women’s stories and historical personalities surprised you or taken your poetry in a different direction than you had expected them to? Who was the most influential of Smith’s wives upon your writing and why?

Dachsel: I have always been interested in fringe religions and about six years ago I became quite obsessed with the FLDS in Bountiful, BC. It was apparent that their practice of polygamy kept them apart from the rest of society. Sure, it was easy to be titillated by it or vilify it, but I wanted to move beyond that and understand why it was so important to them. I started researching and soon discovered that polygamy was secretly practiced by Joseph Smith. I wondered about his wives. They didn’t have generations of this tradition ingrained in them. Why did they agree? What did this mean to them? What were their lives like? And of course, I wondered what I would have done if I had been in their situation. I came across a book that had biographies of thirty-three of his wives and another biography of Emma, his first wife. Of some of the women, very little is known, while others ended up being extremely important to early Mormonism with many biographies.

I was often surprised by details of their stories. He married a few sets of sisters, and one mother/daughter pair. Also, about a quarter of his wives were married to other men and continued to be. This still boggles me.

Very early into the process, I knew that I wanted to do a full manuscript—give each wife a chance to voice her story. Just the magnitude of the project forced me to approach the material in different ways. These are women who mostly married Smith between 1840-1843, came from similar backgrounds, had the same belief system. I was very conscious that I didn’t want to be writing the same poem thirty-four times, and really worked on voice. In a way, they are as much monologues as they are poetry. There were some women who I heard instantly and others with whom I’ve struggled immensely. I also wanted to play with form. In a few instances I found texts where the women told their own stories. I had never created poems from found text before but knew it was something I needed to do. They were quite challenging, but I’m happy with how they turned out. Lucy Walker was one where I tried at least ten different forms over three years based on her words. She was such a struggle. But finally, inspired by Jen Bervin’s Nets, I found what I hope will continue to feel like the perfect form for Lucy: the blackout. I wanted to throw a parade when it all came together.

I am very close to being done, with just one wife left—Emma, Joseph’s first wife, the only who married him monogamously. I’m having the hardest time with her and I think that’s because she’s the one I feel for the most. She married this man against her family’s wishes and less than three years after their elopement he started the church. She faced hardship after hardship and seemed to struggle between wanting to support her husband by being a dutiful, obedient wife to a self-described prophet and what was best for her and her children. The more I read about her, the more I respect her. I want to write a poem that reflects that struggle, but be as interesting and as engaging as I imagined her to be.

WONK: Of all the people that do insane things, few illicit as much attention as do mothers and few as much romanticism as do writers. Being both a mother and a writer, who do you think has more of a right to act out: the creatively brimming writer or the mother with one (or two, or three) too many kids, and why?

Dachsel: Hands down, give it to the mothers. I’m not a fan of bad behaviour, but I think mothers are restrained to a higher standard than the rest of the population and it’s just not fair. Yes, they are raising our future citizens and leaders, but so are the fathers and we should all be modelling good behaviour.

I have a very hard time with the tortured artist syndrome. Being a writer is not an excuse for wallowing in self-pity, drunken binges, or drugs. It’s a job. I hate the stereotype and I hate even more those who use it as an excuse for being an asshole or a wanker. I have zero patience for those who play this role.

Marita Daschel’s poem “Fanny Young” appears in the now available WONK5. A special, limited edition of her poem “Elvira Cowles Holmes” will also be included in the print subscriber version of WONK5.

— Frans Erickson