interview | WONK

Glen Sorestad on Writing in Nature and the Nature of Writing: an Interview

Back in October, WONK had the privilege of hosting a poetry reading with two fantastic poets and orators, Jenna Butler and Glen Sorestad. The night of poetry was well attended and all were glowing with the embers thrown by Jenna and Glen’s reading. Shortly before the event, WONK’s Jonathan Meakin gave us an in depth interview with Jenna Butler where we learned about Jenna’s processes, as both a writer and a publisher. Recently, WONK caught up with Glen Sorestad with hopes of learning a bit about the things that impact his poetry and how, in turn, his poetry impacts the world.

Glen Sorestad is a Saskatoon based poet with a large body of work, spanning several decades. His poetry has been translated widely and is enjoyed in many languages, throughout the world. Glen has been a recipient of many awards for his poetry, the most recent being his investment in the Order of Canada. Like Butler, Sorestad has been engaged in both the writing and publishing end of poetry, the latter through his establishment of Thistledown Press, which he and his wife, Sonia, ran until about ten years ago when they passed on a twenty-five year legacy of ground-breaking publishing, one that continues today. WONK caught up with Glen via email and he was kind enough to provide insightful answers to the following questions.

WONK: As I was reading What We Miss (Thistledown Press), I often found myself feeling as though I was taking a long walk through the seasons of a year, each interval with its own unique sense of description. Does your poetry move with the seasons? Is it inclined, like many northern dwellers, to undergo mood swings from season to season? How do seasonal changes affect your writing and habits, are they part of the process of writing or are they, as for many of us, simply obstacles in the way of getting on with life?

GS: Yes, in many respects my poetry is definitely in tune with the seasons and that is because the natural world has always been a very important part of my life, especially since I grew up from age ten in a rural area of east-central Saskatchewan. Being attuned to nature has always been important to me and I would imagine that anyone who reads through the entirety of my poetry would very likely suggest that the mood or tone of the writing is often affected by the seasons. I am not at all convinced that my writing habits change greatly during certain seasons, but I do know that I find writing comes more easily and more frequently whenever I am away from home and especially if I am in a more natural setting – in the mountains, at the seashore, at a lake writing colony. In the dead of winter, I seldom write very much new work (unless I’m somewhere else), but instead choose to work on the rewriting and revising process. Winter, it seems, is for hibernation. Or escape.

WONK: Your latest collection of poems, What We Miss, is one of over twenty that you have had published. With so much writing experience, is there anything about writing poetry that still surprises you? Does anything ever leap onto the page and catch you off guard? If so, what types of ideas or images are they, and what do you do with them?

GS: One of the joys of the writing process for me is that the element of surprise is never very far away. Sometimes I think it is a genuine surprise, right at the beginning, that the poems still come up from that mysterious well of remembered images, voices, tales, impressions. The unexpected word or phrase that leaps onto the page and catches me entirely off-guard, the suddenly remembered image (now where did that come from?), the phrase that reaches back to childhood, anything that seems to appear as if by some mysterious and unheard calling, something unbidden that offers itself to the poem and finds its way into the flow of the lines. Surprise keeps me writing. If the day should come when I am no longer surprised by things I write, then I expect that will be the signal to quit writing altogether. When I write something new, I want and expect to be surprised by the unexpected. I anticipate it and I’m disappointed if it doesn’t happen.

WONK: As we are — beautifully and sometimes hilariously– reminded in Road Apples (Rubicon Press), you and your wife travel extensively. During those trips, have you ever come upon a place that threatens to pull you from Saskatoon permanently? If such a place exists, what type of place is it? What is it about it that beckons you? What is it about home that makes you stay?

GS: I love to travel and explore different places with their different landscapes and features and there are times when I am in another land when I can very well believe for a moment that I could live happily in that very different place. Besides, I am of Nordic stock and people of my heritage seem to be able to make their homes quite happily anywhere – and do. But this feeling doesn’t last very long for me. The prairies have been my home now for over 60 years and I need this particular landscape to nourish me and to keep me on an even keel. In the end, I can’t imagine leaving Saskatoon, other than winter reprieves, for it has grown around me like a comfortable jacket or sweater. It holds me. Friends, long established relationships – they hold me, too.

Having said that, I find New Mexico an intriguing place because in so many ways it feels comfortable to me when I’m there and I’ve been visiting it on an almost yearly basis for close to 30 years. It is part of the Great Plains and may have many geographical differences, but it has a familiar feel like an old glove. When I am among New Mexicans, it feels very close to being among prairie folk from Saskatchewan or Alberta. It seems to me that we share similar worldviews and attitudes influenced by the great openness and the distances, that huge sky, the incredible play of light and landscape.

WONK: Your poetry has been translated into several different languages and is enjoyed all over the world. Does this international readership surprise you in any way? What do you think draws a reader in Norway or Slovenia to poems that were conceived, born, and raised on the Canadian prairies?

GS: No, I cannot say I am surprised to have an international readership because most of my poetry is about people and place, along with the natural world — something to which all readers can relate. Walking my morning round through the seasons in Lakewood Park is not much different from someone walking a familiar neighbourhood route through the seasons anywhere else in the world, be it across the heathered hills of Scotland, or along a fjord-side path in Norway, or through Central Park in New York.

Of course, there will be a few things that would clearly identify my poems as Canadian, but some purely Canadian or localized references are not going to stand in the way of a reader’s enjoyment of the poem. Part of our understanding of the landscapes and features of other countries has come to us through our reading of poems by poets like Burns or Wordsworth or Yeats or Yevtushenko. We have often carried our “imagined” visuals of certain places before we ever come to visit them

WONK: In June you were appointed to and in November invested in the Order of Canada. Although this is far from the first award you have received, how does, if at all, such an award affect the way you write? Do you feel any added pressure to be more or less of anything in your writing when you are given such a formal reminder of the impact that your writing has?

GS: While any form of award is always appreciated by any writer as a form of recognition and affirmation, I don’t believe that it has, nor should it have, any effect whatsoever on one’s writing. Awards have to do with the public individual and writing has to do with the private individual. The Order of Canada will not change the way I write or what I write in any way, shape or form, nor should it cause me to second-guess anything that I choose to write, or that chooses to be written. It is strictly a public designation that has nothing to do with the creative process.

WONK: Over the years of your literary career, what has changed the most about your writing? On the other hand, what has stayed constant throughout this same time, what are the things you have been unwilling to let go of or to revise? What would you like to change, but have been unable to.

GS: I am probably not the best judge of how my poetry may have changed over the forty-some years I have been writing. I’m sure there are many obvious changes, such as my tendency to use more traditional stanzaic forms more often now than the free-flowing and loose line structures that were part of my earliest writing. I also have tended to take a more traditional approach to the punctuating of poems, as well as the use of capitalization, as I wrote more and learned more about my craft. I would hope that an objective reader would see the changes as being for the better.

What has stayed constant for me are the main themes or concerns of my writing. I am still writing about what interests me and that is people — the always-fascinating interactions of humans trying to understand one another and themselves. I am still responding to the natural world as I did in my earliest poems and have been doing ever since because that world of nature and the turn of the seasons continues to seize my attention and my interest.

I don’t know how to answer the rather intriguing question of what I may have been unwilling to let go of or to revise. I am a tireless reviser and rewriter and so I just accept that anything I write will have to go through the process of assiduous, ongoing revision until I’m satisfied. I won’t let go of a poem until I’m ready, but I haven’t held anything back for a reason other than that I didn’t think it was good enough. Some poems just aren’t meant to be – and I accept that. I just move on to another poem.

What would I like to change? There are many published poems that I have been sorely tempted to rewrite entirely and in my last Selected Poems (Leaving Holds Me Here) I did make some changes in earlier poems. But I am beginning to feel that perhaps earlier poems ought to stand as a measure of what and how I wrote at that time because I am afraid that to alter poems after 40 years is to impose an entirely different set of poetic values on the earlier me. I think I’ll just let them be whatever they are.

WONK: Thank you

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

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