Shedding Some Ink on … Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette’s first book of poetry, The True Names of Birds was shortlisted for the Governor General’s award, the Pat Lowther award, The Gerald Lampert Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. It was also Globe and Mail Books of the Year, and it comes up a lot more than most books in discussions of Atlantic poetry. Her second collection, Undone, “a cornucopia of highly personal, hard-hitting passionate poems,” was equally well received, and shortlisted for several awards, and won the 2005 Acorn-Plantos Award for People’s Poetry. Her debut novel, Lures, was shortlisted for the Thomas Head Raddall award, for the best novel of the year by an Atlantic Canadian.

She’s also been involved with The Maritime Writers’ Workshop, The Banff Wired Studio, and The Sage Hill Writing Experience, in addition to teaching packs of lucky students at Dalhousie. Lastly,and most notably, in my opinion, her so-personal-it-strikes-a-universal-chord brand of poetry has resonated with the public to the point that her poetry has appeared in places like the Toronto subway system, wedding vows, and sidewalks.

Her latest collection of poems, outskirts, is as sophisticated in its fine, figurative language as it is accessible. Its poems jump right to “the energy of human love,” and as the backcover says, “this book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.” Starting out with a poignant, unsentimental look a parenthood, and ending with a candid take on ecological concerns (not without humour), the book runs the gamut of what it means to be a mother, a writer, sleepless, human, a person observing the modern world, and more. John Steffler nailed it, so I won’t bother saying more:

“These poems are all about people – the quick-winged emotions passing between people, love’s claws, love’s rock slides, the heart’s narrow escapes.  Goyette peels back the surface of the familiar human world to reveal the forest-world mysteries, the shape shifting, the glories and agonies truly at play there.  Domestic and shamanic, these open-hearted poems are filled with the lift of discovery and insight.  They stir up language, kindle emotion and appetite.”  – John Steffler

 

What’s been a highlight for you and Outskirts this year?

I really liked the launch. I held it in a great, local bar and asked about 17 people I know: former students, my kids, neighbours, my husband, co-workers, fellow poets, former teachers, friends—to pick a poem from the book and read it. Having people who wouldn’t ordinarily read a poem on stage get up and talk about how they knew me and why they chose the poem brought a great energy to the evening. It amazes me how people still talk about the event, how it threw another log on the great fire of our community and how, because of that night and their shared experience, all those people feel a solid connection to each other.

At the end of the day, what’s nicer: formal recognition from critics and awards, or, knowing your poetry has appeared spray painted on streets and subways, and in peoples’ wedding vows?

It’s always a pleasure to hear that a poem has found its legs and is still walking after I’ve written it whether by being awarded a prize or by finding its way into someone’s day. I figure once my poems are out in the world their migration is mostly out of my hands so I’m always grateful to hear about where they’re turning up.

What are you looking for in a book, when you crack the spine and read?

I like writers who are hospitable to their readers. Who understand the alchemic combination of imagination and curiosity and who aren’t intimidated to dip into the undercurrent of silence that is beneath all good writing. I like it when writing is so authentic and fortifying everything else steps back and I’m following a great trail of thought or story rather than reading a book.

What is one thing you hope a creative writing student walks away from your class with? And is there one universal dogma of writing you believe in?

I love my class. I love that there are students in Halifax who have committed to writing poetry for the year and that they turn up with poems and are willing to read them and listen to others read. Hopefully, my students leave my class with the discipline it takes to keep a writing practice in place as well as being open to discovery and leap in whatever guise they appear in their writing and reading practices. This openness is kin to a kind of playfulness, a willingness to forge into unknown territory and being all right with not doing it well at first, but doing it nonetheless. I also hope they leave the class, whether they to choose to continue to write or not, with an appreciation for the importance of creativity, imagination and curiosity.

What’s some writing advice you’ve read or been told, that’s stuck?

I like Yogi Berra’s: When you arrive at a fork in the road, take it. And Goethe’s: Do not hurry, do not rest. And a great editor once said to me: watch your Goyette-isms, so I keep that in mind as well.

What would you have to say to a bright-eyed first year English student who believes in the mythical figure known as the rich and widely heralded published author?

I find it’s always best to hose that kind of ambition down to the dishevelment and dailiness of an actual writing practice. There’s the other ambition, the ambition to write in a way that exhilarates, that leaps and lands in a direction that wasn’t anticipated. I try and throw logs on the fire of that ambition which isn’t a public, ego ambition but has more to do with artistic integrity and verve.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

The book industry is changing so fast we can’t properly see it anymore for the dust it’s raised. Some of the writers I know feel more responsible for selling their books so I guess my pet peeve is how the industry’s idea of commerce and value has trespassed into some of our writers’ sensibilities. I think it’s really hard to dive into whatever you’re writing if you’re worried about marketability and sales revenue. The idea of commerce is too harsh an exposure when you’re trying to write authentically.

What’s your favourite part of the writing process, your least favourite?

My favourite part of the process is how the very act of writing realigns me and then leaves me behind so that every part of myself dissolves and is participating in the writing.

I need a wide moat of silence around me to be able to write which wreaks havoc on a social life. Mine is severely endangered. That need for silence often wrestles with the need to sit in a crowded bar and talk loudly with people I love. So my least favourite part of the writing process is when the necessary aloneness slides into loneliness.

Is there such thing as one book everyone should read?

If you’re lucky, you’ve encountered a book that fortifies and instigates not just your imagination but your resolve to be the person you most want to be. Whether it’s the story that demands your full attention and presence or it’s the way the language has set a trail through its idea that is both a sanctuary and a call to arms, either way, you’re fully present and awake to the reading of it. These kinds of books are often reliable markers on our trail; we remember where we were when we read them and how they affected and changed us. I hope everyone finds that kind of book to read. Especially when they need it most.

I read an interview where you described your last collection, Undone, as “a sort of lyrical map through emotional territory I knew very little about.” What was being “mapped,” in your words, with the writing of Outskirts?

Undone was part map and part compass and writing it created a sort of trail through a real wilderness in my life that I needed to move through. Outskirts was written a few years later, from an entirely different terrain. I was trying to stay attuned to an imaginative approach to my craft and investigate what was going on in our houses and further afield in a way that invites conversation and reflection and that, hopefully, revitalizes how we appreciate and perceive the people and place around us. It’s a kind of mapping but instigated from an entirely different intention.

If it’s a lyrical mapping of moments that compels you to write, can you trace this pattern back to what incited your very first poem, and provide a rough date of when you became a writer?

Writing, for me, is metaphor. One of the first poems I wrote was inspired by grade eight heartbreak. I wrote a poem about how it felt. The poem had buildings crashing down, a dark sky and the silent opera of my ache. It was really bad, over the top writing but it showed me how ache could be made into or carried in something. A poem, in this case. That was an exciting prospect for me. I could make translations, or maps of things I didn’t understand or ideas I wanted a closer look at with poems. I could put something of this into that.

Your collection made me appreciate my mother even more than I do, and we’re pretty damn close. It’s clearly a big part of who you are, a mother, so, how do you think motherhood has changed and enriched your life, and for the sake of humour, hampered your life?

Being a mother taught me about love. I know that sounds sentimental but I mean love with all its teeth and all the hands it takes to truly let someone go to become who they were meant to be. I was young when I had my kids and I came from a difficult and challenging place. Having kids, hanging out with them, playing and watching how they learned and developed soothed a part of myself that still felt burnt. Their company was the best company and I’m a better person for having them.

Having said that, living with kids is kind of living with wilderness. They don’t conform. They barge into conversations, insist on being answered and then, some of them, for a while, go underground into the basement years and when they do appear it’s sometimes in a puff of smoke which they insist is incense. They biggest thing they hampered, I guess, was my dancing. They hated my dancing which made me dance all the more but to misquote Bob Dylan: it’s pretty hard to dance with all that booing going on.

Speaking of which, we’re all busy, us writers, but motherhood trumps any kind of busy I’ve ever known. I know many a mother who wishes they “had time to write.” Tell those of us reading this who “can never find time to write” how you managed your time to and release such a heralded output of writing.

I didn’t get up at the crack of dawn. I couldn’t. I remember exhaustion and laundry and grabbing minutes at a time. I read like a fiend and kept a book in every room, in the car, in my bag. I wrote bad poems. I once wrote a ten-page poem about ants. My daughter would rush home from school to tell me what had happened that day and she learned to make me pinky swear that I wouldn’t write about it. So I wrote about not writing about it. There’s that great Chinese proverb about if you always head in the same direction, you’ll eventually get there. I believed in that. I had to.

Lines like “Fuck, the new mothers want to say. They have to wash their water with water,” in the award-winning poem, “The New Mothers,” speaks to the intense pressures put on mothers to do everything right, from not eating X foods while pregnant, to attaching “umbrellas to the things that move their children from here to there.” Is the poem a candid and scathing statement, or a sort of humorous portrayal of modern motherhood, washed over with levity. Both, I’d imagine? What spawned the poem?

Both, I think. I was thinking of all the things we did growing up without helmets and seat belts and car seats. How we’d pile in the car and be driven around, rolling in the back seat or lying in the ledge of the rear window. How we were thrown into lakes with the hopes that we’d swim. Skated into boards, sometimes tobogganed so fast we’d bash into fences or trees. We got bruised and skinned and scratched in ways that my kids didn’t. I think helmets and seatbelts make sense but our sense of safety and control sometimes is a little exaggerated, a little intense and we rob our kids of falling and of learning to get back up again. And sometimes it isn’t exaggerated. I have a six-year-old friend who is deathly allergic to peanuts and her mother has had to teach her to ask about everything before she eats it. That level of safety is intense and necessary and, unfortunately, more common than we think. Today’s parents are facing challenges that are different than when my kids were young and the poem was my way of reckoning with all of this.

What drew you in to the use of multi-part poems in Outskirts?

I like how I can circle an idea with a multi-part poem. Explore different angles of it. I also really like the push of a multi-part poem, the pressure the extended look gives to an idea or image, and how that push opens something that is often totally unexpected and surprising. I think these poems are another version of what I’m trying to do with the long line I sometimes use.

My favourite poetry tends to be personal ruminations on fleeting thoughts that find meaning and metaphor in the grander world. Certainly, much of yours does just that. Do you feel like you’re coming to understand more about life, the world, and yourself, as you analyze and translate life events into crystallized language? Or are you just better understanding how to capture moments and metaphors as a poet?

I believe that the way we talk to the check-out person at the grocery store, the way we drive when the roads are crowded, the way we wait for the kettle all are opportunities to define who we are and how we want to be and so writing, the way I write, has become an important way that I define who I am and who I most want to be. I think if you’re nailing something that’s true, that is authentic, it doesn’t lose any of its strength when you put it in the context of the grander world. And that’s a good way to test it.   

Do you have another collection in the works?

I have a collection of poems called Ocean coming out next year with Gaspereau Press.

Congratulations on your recent Established Artist Recognition Award at the latest Creative Nova Scotia Awards Gala. As someone so entrenched in Halifax’s arts scene, can you say it’s a vibrant, booming scene? Predict a few up and comers we’ll be hearing about?

Thanks. Halifax’s art scene persists and does so with great verve and spirit and I’m happy to be part of it. There’s a lovely and vital independence that artists bring to their communities, an invitation to step out of the well-trodden routines of our days to consider a different perspective. And, sometimes, just considering a different perspective can instigate great change in someone. Any arts scene is vibrant, I think. And important.

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