Shedding Some Ink … on Lorri Neilsen Glenn

As a collection of both prose and poems, Threading Light is a unique book I’d like to see more of. There is a central theme of loss and grief here, that was also prominent in your last collection Lost Gospels, What is it that draws you to this subject?

Living it. Learning to immerse myself in it, to dwell in it, look at it straight in the eye. I think we spend our lives learning to lose – dreams, people, keys, causes, faith, face, socks, our way home. But there is sweetness in loss, and finding that sweetness is a kind of grace.

I’m not a melancholic person – I’m generally cheerful and upbeat — but ever since I was a child, death and loss have always provided that razor’s edge, and forced me to pay attention. Writing is a way of documenting and being as present as possible while I’m here. That’s the gift in it, really.

To quote the book, it is also a “tangle of prose and poetry that is a meditation on memory as keepsake.” The malleability of memory has always fascinated me, and how two people can experience, and remember, the same moment differently. What exactly do you mean by this, and how does it apply to the collection’s motif of loss and grief.

I think of memory as a cracked bowl – it fills as it empties. And it’s so much more – it’s not simply file retrieval. It’s malleable, unreliable, and it’s something we construct and re-construct. When I write down a story, I fix details so that they lose their fluidity; I give it hospital corners when it’s really just a messy bed of tumbled covers. It’s amazing when our cousin or sister remembers a detail, and that detail causes a whole scene to bloom again. Each of our recollections is flawed, episodic, saturated with emotion, untrustworthy, and yet they have a truth we have to honour, too. And I think we carry memories in our bodies at a cellular level. So, songs, a whiff of after shave, that old jacket, that rip in your shoe– these are keepsakes in the same way a handed-down story is a keepsake, something that jolts meaning to life for me, but is completely inert for you. And we can never have the whole story anyway.

 I understand that Threading Light was 15 years in the making. What accounted such a span of time?

In the late 1990s, I brought to a workshop a series of prose quilt pieces I’d been working on. The instructor, an essayist, told me it was a fruitless exercise, the form was too unusual, and I shouldn’t bother. I was baffled. But I wanted to spend time with the stories and the ideas, and so I found myself distilling them into poems.  About seven years ago I attended a low residency program to focus on grief and loss. I read and wrote like a demon, and then — as if Penthos were waiting offstage for his cue – faced loss after loss during that period. I turned again to essays to explain to myself the pull and the mystery of writing poetry about loss. Something about amazement and wonder, cutting to the bone, something behind language that’s elusive and sacred. Something, too, that teaches me to get over myself. Two of the original pieces from before were relatively intact – one was the story of my delayed mourning of my fiancé’s suicide; and the other was the story of a summer-long friendship with an aboriginal man in The Pas. I realized that, at its core, the practice of writing is for me a kind of prayer, what I call secular compunction. I’m not a religious person but I am contemplative. I need a lot of time to roll things around, empty myself out, to be solitary and still. So even as I knew a manuscript was developing several years ago, I had to let ideas sift and simmer and steep, and I had to have time for silence, and to be alone.

What piece in Threading light came the easiest to write? The hardest?

The easiest are the anecdotes and the moments of family life and of childhood – those are documentary. The most difficult are the ones where I know that I am working through ideas and pushing against the limits of language. Ideas that hold up a mirror. You know, Rilke: You must change your life.

As a writer, I find I can’t understand my own reaction to many events or choices I’ve made until I’ve mulled it over on paper. Do you find writing these pieces cathartic at all? Or is it simply a matter of examination meets artistic endeavour?

I think that writing both clarifies and pushes thinking – how do I know what I think until I see what I say. Forster, right? Or sends our thinking off in another direction, often right to the sore tooth. I don’t write intentionally for catharsis, or for therapy, but writing does give us our experience back, outside the body, where we can look at it differently. Writing gives me a real sense that my life is both everything and nothing at once – my insignificant particulars are part of an immense universal. The draw for me is the discovery of what’s beyond the self – playing and working inside language to create something inexpressible–art, beauty, insight, transcendence. Both Jan Zwicky and Martha Nussbaum say imagination is not about making things up; it’s about developing the capacity to see from others’ perspectives. In that way, “artistic endeavour,” to use your phrase, can be a reaching beyond ourselves.

Is it emotionally taxing to write? The title does come from “immersing myself in darkness to search with words for threads of light.”

Not so that I’d stop. Yes, I’ve walked around the house not being able to breathe, or I’ve curled up on the couch in a fetal position. And I’ve had weeks of going on auto-pilot after a memory has ripped its claws into my rib cage. But we all have had that happen. Okay, yes, maybe it is emotionally taxing. But it’s also a way of staying close to the intimacy or the core or the heart of whatever it is I have lost or will lose. Finding that sweetness and grace. As Nietzsche said, if you’ve said yes to joy, you’ve said yes to woe.

The book unfolds from stories of personal loss, to loss and grief in the greater world, to how loss and grief unite communities and artists. A big, ambitious, successful sweep. Was this structure intentional, or simply a logical way to present the collection? What is it, ultimately, about loss that unites us as people? Artists?

It’s not so much that the structure of the book was intentional as the process of learning was—but only in retrospect. When I was reading and writing, fairly intensively for about three years or so, I thought a lot about death and dying, about faith traditions, about Western practices around the body, about poets such as Celan or Akhmatova, about trickster figures – it all helped me to see a wider, deeper, longer picture. I wove my own life in and out of that learning. What is it about loss that unites us? Everything. Every step we take is between light and dark. People want to talk about loss, and we want to hear others’ stories of loss and grief. But contemporary culture, at least in North America, keeps us so pre-occupied and distracted that we don’t have time to acknowledge and appreciate them, give them their due. We just buy another gadget or keep the television on. We hide the real reality show we should be paying attention to under stuff and noise. Perhaps artists tend not to be as easily distracted by that noise – artists tend to want to get to the heart of things.

It’s a very poignant, thought-provoking, aphoristic book. Many lines caught my attention, but, perhaps out of context, raised a question for me. “And if I don’t follow that, how can I call my life my own?” I know many artists who can’t follow their (he)art for practical reasons, like the financial reality of the artists’ life. What are your thoughts on this common conundrum of the artist, and how have you found a way around it?

The fridge is empty, so you might have to put on your parka, walk on icy roads to get to a job you may not love when you’d rather sit by the woodstove and write your novel. But I do believe in that line from the Connie Kaldor song – “how can I call my life my own?” I had been wanting to write for twenty years and nibbled around the edges – writing everything else for everyone else. But finally in the late 1990s I started to write “Dentist” on my calendar three times a week so that when someone phoned about a meeting, I could say I was busy. Soon, I didn’t even lie about it anymore. The writing matters, or it doesn’t. For me, it’s like air; I need it, period, or I get antsy. I think of a woman I worked with in Saskatchewan who not only ran a farm, but taught school all day, and raised four children. She got up at 5:45 every morning and wrote for a half an hour. In a year, she had a first draft of a novel. Could I do that? No. But it says to me that it’s possible.

And although we write alone, we need community. To gather around someone’s fireplace, an abbey kitchen, the table in a community hall. We underestimate its importance in loss and in writing – one of the essays in Threading Light is a call to community.

You were Halifax’s Poet Laureate for 4 years. Aside from the honour, what exactly does that entail?

It’s different across the country. For me, it meant attending literary events, invitations to work with writers, and a chance to get away from the keyboard and university work and into the community. I started a youth group, traveled around doing workshops, organized an authors’ night, that sort of thing.

Your work has received high praise, what’s been a career highlight?

Career is a complicated word—it sounds so intentional– yet calling isn’t exactly right either. A highlight was turning to poetry, falling into it and saying to myself, this is what matters. Being accepted to Banff for the writing studio ten years ago caused me to burst into tears. I don’t cry, so that said something about the depth of my longing.

Working with writers on poetry and memoir the last ten years has been a highlight. A story or a poem is sacred and it’s fragile and sometimes it needs support to get out into the world. Being part of that process is a kind of midwifery and although it sounds cliché, it is, truly, an honour.

Off the top of your head, without struggling for “favourites,” name one or two books you really love by an Atlantic Canadian author.

Ah! Too many –and today’s answer would be different from tomorrow’s. I loved the haunting quality of Linda Little’s Strong Hollow; the wit and heart of Stan Dragland’s Twelve Bars; the whimsy and torque of Catherine Safer’s Bishop’s Road. I could name a dozen more. I recommend Joan Clark’s The Word for Home and Joel Hynes’ Down to the Dirt to everyone I know who works with young people.

What are some of the best books you read in 2011?

Again, too many, and best in different ways. Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad. I re-read the Master and his Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. I re-read Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and Jean McKay’s work, which is astonishing.

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

To be surprised and moved. To shake me up, to speak what I was unable to speak myself. To delight in the language and see the world in an unexpected way. Sometimes, just to be lost, dial down the noise of the world.

What is one thing you hope a creative writing student walks away from your class with?

The willingness to take a risk. And – given my own experience – the determination and moxie to say “Shag it – I’m going to write this anyway.”

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

Be there when the writing shows up. Nulle dies sine linea – that’s from my former writing teacher, Donald Murray. Never a day without a line. He sat at his desk every morning for three hours – some days he produced pages, others only a paragraph. It’s good advice that I’ve never been able to follow.

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?

“Oh, honey, we should talk.” I don’t teach first-year English students; my students are graduate students or writers early to the craft, and they seem to be less concerned with fame and fortune and more concerned with the writing. I love their energy– they are hungry for books and ideas and approaches and practices – and are realistic about the work involved.

Any pet peeves with the book industry?

It’s in such flux right now. Every publisher I know is underfunded and understaffed. The smaller publishers, at least. But it wasn’t their policies that put them in that spot. The way we read and communicate with one another about books has changed so much in the last decade that I’m still unsure about what I think. Like many, I’m torn – I want the word to get out about a book, because I want the conversation with readers. Writing is, after all, a conversation. But to promote a book nowadays means flogging your wares at every corner of the internet market. If you don’t do it, the word doesn’t always get out. If I do it, I am turning my attention away from writing and the kind of community I appreciate – the face to face conversation you can find in a kitchen or a library reading room or a coffee house or a workshop. I am feeling as though writers need to be a cross between a telemarketer and an annoying pop-up ad. A techno Carnie barker. Horshack, calling out from the back of the screen.