Showing posts with label Flash Interview. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Flash Interview. Show all posts

Tuesday, 29 March 2016

Flash Interview #12—Vincent Colistro


Vincent Colistro poems have appeared in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Geist and Arc. He was a prize-winner in the 2012 Short Grain contest, and was nominated for National Magazine Award for Poetry in 2014. He lives in Toronto. Late Victorians, his first book of poetry, was published this month by Vehicule Press.

Carmine Starnino: What is a "Late Victorian"?

Vincent Colistro: In Victoria, where I’m from, you can still see the Victorian era’s colonial thumb (skeletal as it is) wiped over everything. There are teahouses that sell expensive doilies and china, sweet shops that continue to import spotted dick and canned treacle, pubs that will pull you a warm bitter as you sit under a portrait of one of the queens. Oh, and gardens. Many many gardens. Then there’s the Empress Hotel, this Edwardian testament to opulence standing over the Inner Harbour. There’s actually a room in there called the Bengal Lounge, which is pretty much a fetish shop for colonialists. It has a tiger’s skin mounted on the wall and steam trays of mild curry to eat with your cocktails.

Anyways, I think I got a little off track. A Late Victorian is equal measures reputable and degenerate. I’m drawn to the idea of crumbling opulence, and, to me, that’s what a Late Victorian is.

It’s also, literally, a dead person from Victoria. So there’s that too.

CS: The middle of the book is given over to the eponymous verse play. What do you like about the form?

VC: I’ve always been more comfortable in mimicry. The book has a lot of first-person poems and most of them are not meant to be your author speaking. Even some of the poems in the third person rely so heavily on free indirect speech they might as well be a monologue. Earlier versions of the play were written like a normal poem, but I thought, why not push this chatter, this plurality of voices into its rightful form? For Plato, that kind of poetry was problematic ethically—it flew in the face of the unified life, its multiplicity somehow nefarious. So… I guess the verse poem is also my way of sticking it to Plato.

CS: The poems are filled with grim, often apocalyptic hints: funerals, massive meteors, city-destroying storms. Are you worried about the future?

VC: Change is coming down the pipe, of that much we can all be sure. But that’s not to say all these characters dread the future. The apocalypse loops back to the "late Victorian." An era of order giving way to era of chaos. All these safe, bourgeois institutions we’ve built can’t save us from what’s about to happen. Some of these characters are too comfortable, and so the threat is enormous. Other characters see the coming storm as transformative in a positive way. One of the characters, hemmed in by order, relishes the opportunity to just bleed everywhere. Myself, I think I’ve felt each of those feelings.

Monday, 28 March 2016

Flash Interview #11—Michael Prior


Michael Prior's poems have appeared in many publications across North America and the UK. His prizes include The Walrus Poetry Prize, Matrix Magazine's LitPop Award, Grain's Short Grain Contest, Magma Poetry's Editors' Prize and Vallum’s Poetry Prize. Prior currently resides in Ithaca, New York, where he is an MFA candidate in poetry at Cornell University. Model Disciple, his first book, was published this month by Vehicule Press.

Carmine Starnino: At one point in "Tashme"—the final poem in Model Disciple—your grandfather asks: "You aren't going / to put everything in the poem, are you?" Do you believe there are certain things that are better off not being included in poems?

Michael Prior: I do. I think a poem is, in an important sense, defined by its silences—whether or not something warrants being included or excluded depends entirely on the context of the individual poem, its configuration of speaker, reader, and writer. But I’m guessing, in particular, you mean to ask about the use of biographical details that when published might prove embarrassing or painful for the poet and others. With “Tashme,” a poem that has an undeniable familial resonance, I really struggled with what it meant to write about the road trip, while doing my best to be aware of my own narrativization of it, trying to resist the appropriations that might (and perhaps do) occur. So, the poem is filled with silences: there are misremembrances, there are miscommunications, there are things that can only be said by not being said. Ultimately, the poem elides certain moments and thoughts because they either seemed unhelpful to the poem as a whole, or I felt they might be too painful for my grandfather to encounter in print. His truths and his understandings obviously do not always align with mine and that’s an important thing to acknowledge. I wanted to write the best poem I could— for it to be emotionally raw and compelling—but I decided early on that even though “Tashme” moves through historical loss and hurt, it was going to be a poem primarily anchored by love. I made choices accordingly. It was the poem I could write when I wrote it: If I were to re-compose it now, or later, I’m not sure how it might differ in its omissions and inclusions.

CS: What are the challenges of writing in blank verse?

MP: There are many challenges, but also some great rewards. For a few of the poems in the book, including “Tashme,” the sort of meditativeness and movement that often occurs within blank verse felt especially important. As well, I was interested in the associative baggage that many of us bring to an inherited form and what can be done by working/playing with a form that calls attention to itself and its lineage so readily. Any devoted prosodist trying to scan the lines in “Tashme” will find they are often only ghosted by the iambic pulse, usually falling closer to something like syllabic metre—this is an intentional sort of internal tension that took a while to find my way to. While writing the poem, I began to think of its idiosyncratic “blank verse” as analogous to the curving highway which the speaker and his grandfather have to not only drive along, but also make frequent detours from, in order to find what they think they’re looking for. On a technical level, the poem went through many revisions, eventually being pared down from over twenty five pages to nineteen; it took a lot of re-reading and then forgetting other poems to find the headspace where I could write it.

CS: The book includes poems about cuttlefish, salmon and hermit crabs.  Are there animals you wish you had written about?

MP: Walruses, Quokkas, and Corgis!

Thursday, 15 October 2015

Flash Interview #9—Derek Webster


Born in Richmond, Virginia, Derek Webster grew up in Beijing, Toronto and London. He received an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied with Carl Phillips, Erin Belieu and Yusef Komunyakaa. His poetry and prose have appeared in Boston ReviewThe WalrusThe Fiddlehead and The Malahat Review. The founding editor of Maisonneuve magazine, he lives in Montreal. His first book, Mockingbird, is being launched this Saturday at Drawn & Quarterly bookstore.

Carmine Starnino: The presiding spirits of your book include Americans like Frost and Stevens, as well British poets like Auden and Larkin, and, of course, that transatlantic enigma Eliot. What draws you to their work?

Derek Webster: Frost’s Virgilian dialogue “Home Burial” was important for me as I put together my long poem “Intervention.” The knife-twisting and sardonic rhymes of Auden and Larkin and the traumatized psyche of Eliot’s The Wasteland helped me make sense of many other things as I went along. All these writers use iambic pentameter as their starting point. I found that using it as a default meter helped me in the early stages of creation. It’s the cabernet sauvignon of meters—a robust, full line that, the more you absorb it, the more it pulls unexpected things from you as you strive to complete a line. Thinking about meter also helps distract from some of the more charged aspects of writing—too much emotion can overwhelm. Of course, rely on it too much, put too much weight on it, you can end up with lines that feel like guide rails. Much Victorian poetry feels that way to me.

CS: It's interesting how your poems often measure things in relation to the past—you’re always looking back at the bigger, bygone, picture.

DW: Well, the past is where ideals go to die, so it’s a rich, complex place for poetry. I like art that captures an unsentimental feeling of history, a connection with people who once stepped spritely where we tromp today. We exist on a very limited scale—modern science tells us we’re barely here at all, that there are other scales unimaginably larger and unobservably smaller than ours. These things make me look for what’s most human in us as a kind of answer, and for me that means love, history and family. I’m not sure if these qualities come across in my own writing, but I think of them when I write, and take pleasure and solace in playing out different results in different poems. There’s a brilliant contemporary poet, James Pollock, who has written a long poem called “Quarry Park” that captures exactly this sense of things.

CS: Has your experience as a magazine editor helped you as a poet?

DW: It’s helped me to discern what’s valuable and alive in my own poems and to leave out things that aren’t. About half of the poems in Mockingbird have been around in some form or another for twenty years. Before I edited Maisonneuve magazine, I was rarely sure of what I had written or why and I had no idea how to make them better. I ran my poems through a gauntlet of drafts and forms that ended up fracturing my confidence because the results weren’t an improvement (the poems got worse, usually). That and some other events pretty much stopped me in my tracks for eight years or more. But when a need compelled me to return to poetry, desperate and a little terrified, I slowly realized something had changed; I knew what to do with my own words now, both the rough scribblings of raw experience and the labouriously reworked “finished” pieces of earlier years. Things started to fall into place then.

Monday, 27 April 2015

Flash Interview #10—Asa Boxer


Asa Boxer is the co-founder of The Montreal International Poetry Prize. This year's $20,000 award is being decided by Eavan Boland. Deadline for entries is May 15.

Carmine Starnino: The Montreal International Poetry Prize continues to be the only award of its kind—delivering a huge sum for a single poem. What's the thinking there? Why the focus on the poem?

Asa Boxer: We wanted to signal to audiences that the poem is a work of art, at least as valuable as other, perhaps more visible art forms. Folks are willing, for example, to pay to see theatre, dance and film. I'm not sure a poem has equal purchase on wallets. Meanwhile the visual arts are currently in the midst of a parody of value, where a painting that fetches a mere six figures is a sign the creator has achieved only moderate success. So the idea, in part, was to announce loud and clear to a culture obsessed with measures that poetry had measurable value.

Back in 2010, when the idea of the Montreal Prize was conceived, there were few prizes offering big purses to poets. Mostly it was collections of poems that had a chance of landing a significant prize amount. The poetry competitions that awarded the largest amounts for single poems were old in 2010, and the sums they offered had lost their glimmer. We hoped to nudge those up by example. In many cases, literary journals were offering thousands to the winner of a short story competition, while insulting poets with a paltry sum, as though poems were what you wrote during a commute or during a lunch break. The message was, don't bother with this minor art form, nobody really wants it. We wanted to change that. So we designed a prize that would award tens of thousands for a single poem, no longer than forty lines.

CS: The prize's internationalism has ramped up considerably since its inception, with your current editorial board featuring poets from Trinidad, Nigeria and India. Why make the enterprise so diverse?

AB: I'd say we always had a strong international editorial board. What's changed is how far we can reach into poetry circles that were remote in 2010. By asking for recommendations from our African, Caribbean, Indian and Australian sources, we can now get to emerging poets and poets who were not in the major anthologies but clearly should have been. Then we can invite them to join our editorial board for a season or encourage them to participate as contenders in the competition.
The desire for this sort of diversity is rooted in curiosity and a desire to expand our notions of what poetry can be. Just as Ezra Pound looked to foreign poetries (like Japanese) to learn other approaches and techniques in the medium, the Montreal Prize hopes to keep apace of how folks are writing in different countries and to be a vehicle of cross pollination.

CS: What are some trends you've seen in submissions over the last few years? Is English-language poetry in good health?

AB: Happily, I haven't seen trends in the sense of fashions. In other words, our anthologies haven't represented a dominant style or subject. There has been diversity on that front. I'm not in a position to say whether English-language poetry is in good health. It has become an industry, though, which is antithetical to its spirit: there are mechanisms that keep the presses running whether the material is worth printing or not. I suspect also that globalization along with the Creative Writing Program have contributed to what looks like an unnerving uniformity of expression. I have definitely seen less culturally inflected diversity than initially hoped for. For example, I suppose Caribbean folk couldn't keep writing in pidgin, but it's as though the sound of their work (on the page at least) has lost that Caribbean lilt and swagger. Things are in flux right now, I can say that much. The UK, for instance, once a leader in the poetry world, is now on a par with everyone else. The best African poetry seems the most urgent and most distinct. I think poets ought to be turning their attention there right now.

Monday, 13 April 2015

Flash Interview #11—Talya Rubin


Poet, playwright and theatre creator/performer, Talya Rubin’s poetry received the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. In 2011 she was short-listed for the Winston Collins/Descant prize for Best Canadian poem and was a finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize. She lives in Montreal with her husband and son. Leaving the Island—launched at Drawn & Quarterly on Thursday, April 16—is her first book of poems.

Carmine Starnino: The opening section of your debut describes the Scottish island of St. Kilda as a pretty grim and deprivation-ridden place. If those poems were made into a film, which director would get it right?

Talya Rubin: Lars von Trier would no doubt do a stellar job of making the landscape particularly miserable, but the human aspect would most likely get lost in the abject misery. He tends to be so heavy handed in his bleakness these days, although I am a big fan of his earlier films. Breaking The Waves could almost be a modern day St Kilda story. It's interesting that you think film and drama right away, as the poems do seem to contain a lot more than geography. The ghosts of that place spoke to me in so many layers. I think someone made an opera about St Kilda—heightened human drama and intensity that lends itself to opera, no doubt. Andrea Arnold is my favourite UK filmmaker alive right now. She is very contemporary and deals with working class urban issues, so not an obvious fit, but she did do a re-make of Wuthering Heights, so I think she would be my first choice. She knows how to hone in on a detail and tell a human story like no one else making films right now.

CS: You won Harbourfront's Battle of the Bards in March. A number of people in the audience later told me about how powerfully you read. Are the theatrical and aural aspects of your poetry important when you write?

TR: Hugely important. I'm a theatre maker and a performer as well as a writer, and when I write for theatre I literally speak the text up on my feet. I then transcribe what I've written onto paper. I believe I write poetry in a similar way, only it is by its very nature a more formal process. Most of the poems arrive with some kind of whispering in the ear though, a niggling feeling that there is language there, a rhythm of some kind, an urgency or insistence on an arrangement of words into particular meaning. I often hear things before I write them and when they arrive like that I know a poem is there. Sometimes I carry a poem around in my head for a while before committing it to the page, so voice is very strong for me, and where these words come from is certainly an inner kind of listening. And then, because I am naturally a person who likes to read words on a page out loud I have an innate desire to bring those words to life as a performer. As though the blood and heart beat behind the poem needs to get out. When I read poems by other authors, I often have to read them out loud to really know them, to hear them. The voice in our heads is one thing, but what a liberating, enlivening thing it is to read poetry out loud. I see it as a performative and a visceral experience, not in any forced way, but almost by necessity. I think it is part of what poetry is—this very aural thing at both its source and the way it gets conveyed, like you are writing/speaking from your own inner ear to your reader's/listener's. But I still think poems written with this inner ear need to have rigour on the page. There is an expectation (rightfully so) that poetry in print is going to work visually and read in a more literary, fixed way, and this aural aspect is never going to replace an awareness of line and form. It is about how that listening is translated into something more formal that is going to work on the page.

CS: The last section of the book is comprised of prose poems describing a stay on a Greek island. Why the prose poem? What can it do that a traditional poem can't?

TR: I think the prose poem is a perfect example of this aural tradition. It compresses language so that lines are bumping up against one another, so that breath is almost compressed as well. The prose poem also has an inherently lyric aspect, it sinks us into language so deep we are drowning. And for me, the job of the prose poem is then to make sure the reader can swim, can get to the surface for air—but only just. That the rush of language doesn't entirely overwhelm and the choices that are made are still exacting and ripe with precise meaning. I tried to break those prose poems into more traditional line breaks at one point as an experiment, and it was completely off, it was like trying to force something into the wrong space. Not because the lines wouldn't hold on their own, but because the form is entirely different. I like Charles Simic's take that a prose poem is: "a burst of language following a collision with a large piece of furniture." There is action in a prose poem and an absurd leap. And I think this particular suite of poems was asking for that. It is a series of poems about a really heightened experience, it contains the personal and the mythic, it holds a vast span of time; ancient history and the here and now. So the form seemed right for the content. There is something impossible about a prose poem. The image of those glass bottles with boats in them comes to mind. I always think, "how did those things get in there?" And a prose poem to me is like that, it is like an impossibly large thing fitting into a small thing. And the impossibility of it—the wonder of it—is the form itself.

Wednesday, 18 February 2015

Flash Interview #8—Chad Campbell


A finalist for the 2013 Malahat Long Poem Prize, Chad Campbell’s poetry has appeared in Maisonneuve, The Puritan and Arc, among other magazines. Originally from Toronto, he is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives and teaches in Iowa. Laws & Locks, his first book, is due out from Signal Editions in April.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

Carmine Starnino: Tell me a little about your family and why you decided to tell the story about them.

Chad Campbell: We started out, eight generations ago, on Islay, one of the small Isles off the west coast of Scotland. There was a detour in North Carolina, but the family abandoned the farms there and settled—after being sung a pretty song about the opportunity of land north of Toronto—in Eldon, Ontario. I know all that because my grandfather, in his retirement, started the thirty years of research it took to trace our family back into the mists. I stand in his debt. This book wouldn’t exist without the foundation of research that he laid out.

The decision to tell the story, if it came at all, started with my time caring for my mother when she had her first serious manic bout. When things settled, I was left with questions. My life wasn’t free of mental illness, I’d struggled with and, at the time, continued to struggle with addiction. That and the illnesses, obsessions and thirsts that seemed to flourish in my family left me asking what the fuck is happening.

So I started going back. Not looking for some grim root of madness in the family, but instead to try and get a sense of the shape of the mind that seems to have been passed down through the generations. And that’s what I found. Not a singular madness or anything of the sort, but a sort of potential that was more pronounced in some lives, and less in others. Though, at least within the confines of my family, the madness and addiction never appeared out of nowhere, but flourished in the presence of grief, loneliness, and isolation. The first of which is a part of life, the second two became more and more impacted in the family’s experience as they cut ties with farming and more communal living, and took up desks across the country.

But telling the story become important to me. There is so much silence, and fear, around issues of mental health and addiction. The idea that these are weaknesses, to my mind, is a part of what keeps these things unaddressed, tucked away, loathed.

CS: Robert Frost—"No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." What surprised you most when writing the poems in Laws & Locks?

CC: I think it would be just how much we share as a family. Some of this had to do with livelihood. A couple of generations after the farms were up and running in Ontario, people were able to exercise a bit more choice in terms of livelihood. The Campbells started teaching—school, university, church, tailoring—and I had absolutely no clue when I shakily taught my first course at the University of Iowa, that I would be the sixth generation to get up in front of a class.

But more even more than this it was the shape of the mind I was mentioning before—a nervousness about life, a reverence for books, ways of speaking in letters, mannerisms and illnesses of the mind that persisted across the generations. And of course, the sheer, almost baffling oddity of having gone for treatment at the same asylum that one of my family had gone to a hundred and seventy years before me.

In terms of the writing, I think it would be just how much the material demanded that I learn to modulate my voice and perspective from poem to poem. I felt absolutely thwarted at times, struggling with issues of witness and how, exactly, to approach and write towards some of these people. Whether I succeeded is another matter.

CS: Why all the love for the ampersand?

CC: I started using them when I was writing "February Towers," the poems that deal most directly with mania. Not in the first drafts, but once the poems started to settle into the textual blocks they’re written in now, I began to get a better sense of what the form was trying to get at—the sense of something fraught happening in a cramped space; mania in a small house. As the drafts progressed I started looking for ways to turn up the volume on what the form was driving after. Ampersands can quicken lines & oddify things somewhat—that’s the way I see them working in "February Towers": quickenings, traces & tracers in service of the dislocation the poems were born from.

After that sequence I backed away from them and used ampersands only when the poem or poems seemed to do better with them. In the case of the more historical poems that start the book off, I liked the way they call attention to themselves, how they alter the norm a little. For poems that draw as heavily on other people as those do, a bit of otherness, even from ampersands, felt right.

Saturday, 23 February 2013

Flash Interview #7: Donald Winkler


Filmmaker and translator, Donald Winkler won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation in 2011. His translation of Daniel Poliquin’s La Kermesse (A Secret Between Us) was a finalist for the 2007 Giller Prize. The Major Verbs—his translation of Pierre Nepveu's  Les Verbes Majeurs—appeared with Signal Editions in Spring 2012. He lives in Montreal.
Carmine Starnino: What drew you to Pierre Nepveu's book? 
Donald Winkler: I've been drawn to Pierre's poetry for a long time. I translated an earlier book, Romans-fleuves (Exile Editions, 1998), but I first translated a few of his poems way back in 1984 for the translation revue Ellipse. I felt an instant affinity. His poetry had—well, you would use the word "souffle" in French: a drive, a thrust, a muscularity and a concreteness that appealed to me greatly. And a capacity, out of its sheer momentum, to soar into surreal riffs without losing contact with reality. I can still remember trying to be true to that, wrestling with lines like "old archangel you know it all / you played the owl those canted nights / head trepanned with antennas and methanol / airs stirred up by sullen desire" (my version of it, of course). Translating him was a gladiatorial exercise. Still is. Pierre in person is gentle and almost self-deprecating, but something else kicks in when, as a poet, he puts pen to paper. I also like the way in which he feels his way into the characters in his poems. In The Major Verbs, one entire sequence, "The Woman Asleep on the Subway," imagines the life of an immigrant night worker in a high rise office building, her alienation, and her memories, or fantasies, of the land she left behind. Nothing formulaic or didactic, but a powerful, often dream-like evocation. The sequence in memory of his dead parents is a collage in verse that is both an affectionate tribute to them and an honest portrayal of lives that knew their share of disappointment, that were at times troubled. Between these two is a series of meditations on a small pile of pebbles on a table, a representation in miniature of the outside world's opacity in a time of anguish for the speaker. But the book ends with a long contemplative poem set in the Arizona desert, a coda imbued with grace. All in all, an impressive achievement. 
CS: If you had to nominate a Canadian poet as the anglo doppelganger for Nepveu in terms of shared subject and style, who would it be and why? 
DW: I'm afraid that any specific example I may come up with might be misleading. But let me say this. As a literary critic, Nepveu has taken as his field of study all of America, and has written eloquently about the continental landscape, and the contradictory urges to celebrate wide open spaces (Whitman) and to seek a protective nest when confronted by them (Dickinson), the latter impulse being less widely recognized, in his opinion, than it ought to be. His book Intérieurs d'un nouveau monde, which exists only in French, is a brilliant survey of Quebec, Canadian, American, and Haitian writers, as seen from this perspective. The book reflects his own travels (including a period when he lived in Vancouver), and deals knowledgeably with Canadian and American poets such as Dennis Lee, Atwood, Klein, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens. He is perhaps the most pan-American of Quebec poets. And I believe the influence shows in the diction and the vision and the psychology of his poetry, although this is more of an intuition on my part than anything else. 
CS: You've translated a number of Québécois authors, often working closely with them. Have you ever resisted their suggestion in order to keep a word choice or phrase that you thought was closer to the spirit of the poem or story? Do you have an example? 
DW: I haven't had to resist too energetically. The poets' understanding of English is often quite good, but at times they may not appreciate all the nuances of the English word, which is in fact closer to the intent of the original than they suspect. I consider myself a "situational" translator where poetry is concerned, in that my word choices are predicated on the degree to which the original word was selected on the basis of its meaning, its music or its rhythmic compatibility, so that on one occasion, when translating Roland Giguère, I used a word with a totally different meaning, because his own word choice was almost exclusively based on the word's sound. The original poem read: "tant de vie pour un mort / tant de mots pour un mur." So you had mort, mur. But it literally translates: "for one death so much life / so many words for one wall." I wrote: "for one death so much life / so many words for one breath." So I had Death, breath. I ran this past him, and he was okay with it. 

Tuesday, 22 November 2011

Flash Interview #6: Mark Callanan

(Author photo by John Guy.)

Mark Callanan is the author of Scarecrow (2003), a critically-acclaimed first book of poems, and Sea Legend (2010), winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award. His poetry has appeared in several anthologies, including Breathing Fire 2: Canada’s New Poets. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland with his wife and children. Gift Horse (2011) is his most recent collection.

The following interview was conducted by e-mail.

Carmine Starnino: What's with all the mermaids in Gift Horse?

Mark Callanan: That obsession was prompted, at least in part, by Paul Muldoon’s collection Mules, in which a merman is one of several hybrid characters. The title poem of Muldoon’s book begins with the line, “Should they not have the best of both worlds?” The answer is no: hybrids are border dwellers, creatures of a liminal space; mermaids may have both human and fish parts, but they can’t be wholly part of either world, so in a way, they don’t belong anywhere.

I like the idea of a creature that straddles two worlds because it’s metaphorically rich territory, in terms of my perception of Newfoundland, and in terms of my own divided sense of self. Newfoundland, to my mind, is stuck between its colonial past and its present status as a province of Canada; it’s part of Canada, but apart from Canada—a separation that owes its genesis to the still contentious issue of Confederation; it’s split between Old World mores and modern, North American sensibilities, between inherited English, Irish, Scottish and French oral traditions, and a much younger print culture; geographically, it’s positioned between Europe and North America; it’s bound to its traditional industry, the fishery, but also pulled by the allure of our rapidly growing oil and gas industry, as well as by the urge to package and sell itself as tourism product.

And I’m a creature divided as well. My mother grew up in a fishing community, pre-electricity; my father grew up here in the more modern capital. I grew up in St. John’s as well, in a suburban neighbourhood that, in many ways, could have been the playground of any North American kid. Why, then, should my sense of identity as a Newfoundlander be linked to notions of a life lived on the sea?

All this leads me to another aspect of that idea of internal division: I find it hard to take a stance sometimes, because I can easily see both sides of a given argument.

I guess I’m trying to tell you that I’m a mermaid.

CS: You seem pretty grounded in St. John's. Is there anywhere else you would consider moving?

MC: Sure. I lived in Leeds for a couple of years in my early twenties. I loved being there. Funny thing is, it reminded me of St. John’s—though, on the face of it, they have little in common. It seemed to me that they were both emerging from periods of economic depression. Leeds is a former industrial town remaking itself as a hub for the technology industry; St. John’s is a port town reaping the benefits of a sudden influx of oil money. My friends in Leeds told me it was a pretty depressing place to grow up, circa the 1980s; St. John’s, post-moratorium, was similarly afflicted. There was this pervasive sense of hopelessness that infected my generation. That’s changed now, of course. At the moment, St. John’s an exciting place to live. There’s a creative energy here I find infectious. There is still a lot about Newfoundland that I dislike: that we haven’t learned confidence in our means; we’re amazed by our successes, literary or otherwise, as if we haven’t earned them. Also, our reverence for tradition is both boon and bane. It’s important to know where you’ve come from, yes, but that can be crippling, too, if the past becomes a fixation, a fetish: a thing lauded for its own sake. That said, I love it here—more than that, I feel as if my fate is bound up in the fate of this island.

CS: Are there aspects of Newfoundland that can't be put in a poem? That you have to just live there to get?

MC: Nope. My ego tells me there’s nothing I couldn’t conjure. My ego lies, though. Often.