Kim Fahner lives and writes in
Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the
first woman appointed to the role. Kim’s latest book of poems is These Wings
(Pedlar Press, 2019). She’s a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the
Ontario Representative for The Writers’ Union of Canada (2020-22), and a
supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim won the 2021 League
of Canadian Poets Broadsheet Contest with her poem, “Beekeeping.” She can be
reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
What took you away?
I lived in Ottawa from September 1994 until September 1995, in one
of those uniform block concrete high-rise apartment buildings off Walkley Road,
but I always wished I had lived down in The Glebe. My biggest regret in life,
or one of them, is that I didn’t live somewhere off Bank Street, where
everything that was really exciting seemed to be happening.
I ended up in Ottawa because I was accepted to do an M.A. in
English Literature at Carleton University. I had lived in Sudbury all of my
life, so going away to a bigger city to grad school was on my list of ‘things
to do.’ Ottawa had Irish music, amazing art galleries, and it just seemed so
much more sophisticated than Northern Ontario to me. I was 23.
When I graduated with my Master’s degree in Fall 1995, I came back
home, northwards. I had applied and been accepted to Memorial University in
Newfoundland to work on a PhD in English Literature, with a focus on the work
of modern Irish and Newfoundland women poets, but I decided against it. I felt
torn between doing academic work and writing, and then the strong pull of my
own creative writing. I think I knew, somehow, that the two wouldn’t work for me.
I knew that I’d end up giving up one for the other, so I made a decision to
move away from academia. It was a hard thing to leave Ottawa and come back to
Sudbury because I had fallen in love with the city and had made good friends
there. I occasionally have those ‘Sliding Doors’ moments when I think “oh…I
wonder what my life would have been if I’d stayed on…”
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently,
the writing community here?
I’ve always written, so I can’t really remember when I began. For
me, writing is like breathing. I can’t live without it. Studying English
Literature at Carleton meant that I met a lot of grad students who were also
writers. We naturally gravitated together and spent time outside of classes, hanging
out at our respective apartments, or at pubs, and sharing our poetry. I had a
small group of four fellow poet friends and we spent a lot of time just
marinating in poetry, philosophy, and pints of Irish beer down at The Celtic
Cross. There was a great Celtic band that used to play there once a week. They
were called “Up All Night,” and I remember that the bartender was a handsome,
long haired guy from Dublin, so he was lovely to chat up over a pint of
Kilkenny while there was a penny whistle and a Stan Rogers song playing
somewhere in the background.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your
thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to
where you have lived since?
Being with other young writers meant that we did wildly poetic
things like walk down to the Centennial Flame at 1:30am and just stand around
it talking. We were English grad students. Our behaviour didn’t surprise any of
us. We were spontaneous and eccentric, and that was okay. I recall a middle-of-the-night
drive into Gatineau to go sit next to a moonlit lake to star gaze, but the park
police found us, scolded us, and turned us around. The Skydiggers were playing
on a cassette in the car as I drove. I can still picture that night so vividly
if I close my eyes and remember it. The park police officers didn’t care that
we were poets…waiting for the poems. We didn’t know that we were living our own
poems at the time, but looking back, it seems that we were doing just that.
I think Ottawa, for me, was about being in the right place at the
right time. I had lived a really sheltered life up until my early twenties,
with fairly strict parents, so moving away was like breaking free. It felt to
me like the graduate degree gave me the ability to explore the world and life
in a different way. I don’t know that there’s been a place that’s done that
since for me until the time I spent almost a whole year living in Kingsville,
near Windsor, in 2018. I wanted to see if I should move south from Sudbury, and
I seriously considered it, mostly because I had the best time hiking in the
most beautiful places down in Essex County. I didn’t have to worry about northern
bears while hiking alone in the summer, and the migrations of so many different
types of birds around Kingsville just really enchanted and intrigued me.
When I first went to Pelee Island for a writing retreat in May
2016, I lost my heart to the variety of migrating birds and the immensity of
the Carolinian trees. It felt like the natural world was immense around me, and
I loved seeing red winged blackbirds and starlings sweeping across country
roads in murmurations. I felt small in the face of such natural beauty, and I
fell in love with Lake Erie and Point Pelee National Park. So, living down in
Essex County, through most of 2018, changed me again. While I lived in Ottawa,
and again in Kingsville and Windsor, I could step outside of the box I’d
coloured myself into and was able to explore my writing more creatively. Both
places are dear to me now, but Ottawa…will always be the first place that
cracked me open creatively, so it’s very dear to me.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere
else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
I just remember being overwhelmed by the number of poetry readings
I could go to, and the variety of little poetry ‘zines that were around Ottawa
in 1994-95. I was so excited when I had a couple of my newest poems published.
I still have copies of those ‘zines in a box of early publications. The other
thing I loved about Ottawa was the ability to see live music and theatre. I
remember seeing Great Big Sea and Uisce Beatha at the little concrete
amphitheatre in front of the National Gallery of Canada. I saw Loreena
McKennitt perform at the National Arts Centre, and I just remember going to
cool little shows at the SAW Gallery and being able to meet and hang out with a
wide variety of artists, musicians, and writers. It felt, to me, like the world
bloomed artistically in front of me.
I read at the National Arts Centre—for the Laureate City
event—back in 2018, when I was the Poet Laureate here in Sudbury, and I spent a
great deal of my time wandering around my old haunts. I also got to attend the
Governor General’s Literary Awards during that same visit, so I have very fond
memories of feeling like Cinderella going to a ball. Too, I met new poet
friends I’ve stayed in touch with over the Internet since then, all of whom
live and write in Ottawa. Funny how things sometimes come full circle in your
life....
Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your
engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the
way you approached your work?
Some of my earlier poems, in You Must Imagine The Cold Here
(Scrivener Press, 1997) and braille on water (Penumbra Press, 2001),
were written about my time in Ottawa. I owe the city, and Carleton University,
a great debt of gratitude. It was there that I met John Flood, who ran Penumbra
Press. That his press published northern writers was what drew me to submit my
first full length manuscript to him. That he said yes, and then also published
my next book The Narcoleptic Madonna (2012), meant the world to me. I
would never have had those first two full books of poems if I hadn’t met John
at Carleton.
I had two really amazing professors at Carleton who formed me as a
thinker and writer. My thesis supervisor was Dr. Jack Healy, and he put up with
my endless drafts and revisions of a thesis on Seamus Heaney’s bog poems. I
also took his postcolonial lit course and read literature from the Caribbean
and Australia. I first came to Derek Walcott’s poems through Dr. Healy, so I’ll
always be grateful for that. The other professor of note was Dr. Brenda Carr,
who taught me a feminist poetry course. Prior to grad school at Carleton, I
hadn’t read a lot of contemporary Canadian women poets. Her class changed that
for me. It’s where I came to read Bronwen Wallace, Daphne Marlatt, Betsy
Warland, and Marilyn Dumont. That I came to all of these new poets and new
ideas at Carleton, and that I met some great writers and friends, formed me as
a person and writer. I still stay in touch with my friend Dan Laxer, who lives
in Montreal. I’ve known him for over a quarter of a century, but we can talk on
the phone and the time disappears. I still write poetry. He still writes
poetry. Our friendship is a nice link to a time that I remember fondly.
Q: What are you working on now?
I’m working on a suite of poems around the life of Galileo, inspired by
a book launch that I saw on Facebook. Alice Major, an amazing Edmonton poet and
friend, helped to launch Paul Pearson’s book, Lunatic Engine, which was
inspired by Dava Sobel’s Galileo’s Daughter. The more I heard about
Sobel’s book, the more I wanted to read it. I’ve been fascinated by Galileo for
a while, but hearing Dava Sobel speak and read during that virtual book launch
really sort of drew me in. I don’t see the poems I’m writing about Galileo as a
lengthy suite of work, but rather as a sampling of some ideas that have emerged
in my mind as I read Sobel’s book. I love astronomy, and have since I was
little, so I think that’s why I have always wanted to know more about Galileo’s
life. His horoscope making skills intrigue me, too, because I find astrology
fascinating, and because I think it’s interesting how—at that time in
history—astrology wasn’t as ridiculed as it is sometimes is now in western
society. He was a mathematician, a scientist, a philosopher, and an astrologer.
I love that he was so diverse and multi-faceted.
I’m also working on a suite of ekphrastic poems based on the artwork of
Andrea Kowch, who is an American artist I quite admire. The women she paints
have hair that look a lot like my hair, which is sort of wild, ‘tumbleweedy,’ and
curly, which is probably why I was intrigued by her work in the beginning—because
I felt I saw myself so strangely reflected in their faces and bodies. I really
love how her paintings seem like doorways into story, that the potential
narrative is just hovering there, waiting to be discovered or unveiled. I also
love the way the wind works in her paintings. I love weather, and one of my
favourite things to do is to walk outside in the rain or snow. A blustery day
blows the cobwebs out of my body, so I’m drawn to weather—external and
internal—in ways I’m working through in these new poems. Kowch’s work, too, is
fascinating to me because she situates the women in her paintings within
midwestern American landscapes of farms and fields, but then also places them
inside surrealistic domestic vignettes. I love that contrast. The weather
enters into the farmhouses, literally and metaphorically. Beyond that, I find
the sort of blank faces interesting because I want to know more about what is
going on behind their eyes, what stories those women in those paintings must
have to tell. And then…I imagine them.
Lately, I’ve been inspired by Nicolas Bruno’s exhibit, The Somnia Tarot.
He’s created wonderfully evocative photos based on the imagery of the Rider
Waite Smith tarot deck. What intrigues me there is the artwork, but also the
notion of archetypes and symbology. So far, I’m only a few cards in, and only
those that draw me in terms of metaphor have become poems. I’m keenly awaiting
the arrival of his deck of cards, so I can spend time looking at them and then
writing poems.
