Fluid communities

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So I interviewed Winnipeg-based Metis writer Katherena Vermette about her debut novel, The Break, for the fall issue of The Winnipeg Review.

(This is my second conversation with Kate. The first was back in 2012 when her first book, North End Love Songs, was published.)

Since the interview was published, The Break has appeared on the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Award for Fiction shortlists and has been reviewed by the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Congrats to Kate!

Unicity: Joan Thomas

Winnipeg novelist Joan Thomas will probably remember October 7, 2014 for a long time.

This morning, it was announced that her third novel, The Opening Sky, was shortlisted for a Governor General's Award for the Arts. And then, tonight, Joan will have her Winnipeg launch.

I interviewed Joan a few days ago before all the hoopla descended. And am happy to share this quiet little interview today, given that it reflects Joan and her work perfectly: intelligent, wide-ranging, courteous.

What do you want people to know about The Opening Sky?

The Opening Sky is the story of three people in present-day Winnipeg going through an intense personal crisis. It’s very different than my last novel Curiosity, which looked at how 19th century England was rocked by the discovery of huge reptile fossils on a Dorset coast. But it has the same preoccupation at its core. How do people respond when the way they see the world is fundamentally challenged?

As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

Public readings were hard for me at first (What is a writer but a failed talker? I ask). But there’s something wonderful about reading aloud and being read to, and gradually I’ve become more at ease with it. Sometimes I actually love it—when the lights are dim, and the sound system lets you talk naturally, and you can tell people are really listening. By the time a book goes to press, each page has been so scrutinized that it has almost lost its meaning for you. And then in that moment, you experience the intimacy between the audience and the story, and the words are fresh and forceful for you again. That’s the gift an audience gives a writer.

Your first two books, Reading by Lightning and Curiosity, were historical fiction set in England and rural Manitoba. What was it like to write your own time and place? What was it like to invent a fictional street in Wolseley?

It was incredibly scary—I feel way more “out there” with this book. For one thing, the burden of proof is higher. When a novel has a familiar setting, readers bring a sharp eye to every detail. And in a culture where ideas and artefacts have a shelf life of about 12 hours, it’s daunting to get things right.

I think every novelist with serious intentions is staggered by the complexity and chaos of life today—it made me nostalgic at times for the certainties of the 19th century. But I think it’s crucial that writers take on the challenge of the present. I don’t mean that I approached it as a duty. My own reading is almost exclusively contemporary novels, so it was exciting to finally write one. But it was harder, and I likely had to have the first two books under my belt before I could tackle it.

Augusta Street...I wanted to capture this family’s life in all its particularity, so I needed a house number. And I didn’t want to use a real house on say, Greenwood or Lipton. Augusta Street is by no means my largest liberty with Winnipeg. I’m waiting to hear what Winnipeggers think of the others. But you know how it is—the demands of the story will always win out.

Your bio says that you’ve been writing fiction since 2000. You taught high school English as well as working as a freelance writer and program officer at MAC. What prompted you to turn to creative writing? Can you pinpoint the moment?

It’s clear to me now that I always wanted to write fiction, but I seldom admitted it. I thought that probably everybody who grew up reading Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon dreamed of being a writer. I did a lot a lot of reviewing in the 1980’s and 90’s, so I was always thinking about how fiction works. And then a story based on something that happened when I was a kid came to me and I thought I’d try to write it. I never published it, but I joined a writing group and worked mainly on fictionalized memories. Those pieces led me to Reading by Lightning, which is set in the decade when my mother was a girl.

I remember a weekend with friends at Victoria Beach. We waded out to Elk Island and while we were sitting on the sand, I told them the story I was contemplating for Reading by Lightning. All of them were artists in one way or another, and they were tremendously supportive. That gave me a big boost.

What are your goals for your writing now, as compared to when you first started publishing?

At first the question that preoccupies new writers is, “Can I really do this?” I’m not plagued by that anxiety to the same degree, though in a certain respect you have to lay hold of a new confidence with each new project.

I think writers pick off the low-hanging fruit with the first few books, using a lot of stored-up creative ideas. And then you have to dig deeper—but I hope this means that your work deepens. I’m not jumping too quickly into another book. I’m thinking hard about the things I most want to explore.

What would you tell a stranger about Winnipeg?

I’ve just written 350 pages set in Winnipeg, but the one-sentence description is beyond me.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing?

I’m reading Caroline Adderson’s new novel-in-stories, Ellen in Pieces. It is the funniest, most alive, true and astute foray into one woman’s life. I can’t praise it enough. And as for writing, I’m making notes towards a new novel, doing a bit of research, drafting short passages. My idea is still in the shape-shifting stage.

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This is the third installment of a new interview series I'm calling Unicity, which, according to Wikipedia, was a term used to refer to Winnipeg around 1972.

That was when the rural municipalities of Charleswood, Fort Garry, North Kildonan, and Old Kildonan, the Town of Tuxedo, the cities of East Kildonan, West Kildonan, St. Vital, Transcona, St. Boniface, and St. James-Assiniboia were amalgamated into what we now know as Winnipeg.

The Chicago of the North. One Great City. Murder Capital of Canada. Winnerpeg.

The series runs parallel to my other interview series, Out of Town Authors, but takes as its subjects local authors instead of visiting ones.

Unicity: Melanie Dennis Unrau

Melanie Dennis Unrau is just about to publish her first book.

Her launch is set: September 30 at McNally Robinson Booksellers in Winnipeg.

Between now and then, she has to pick a set list, rehearse said set of poems, figure out her thank yous, decide what to wear. She has to send out invites to most everyone she knows. She has to decide if she wants her two children in attendance and, if not, who will take care of them during the launch... [...]

In these anxious-yet-heady weeks before her book is launched,  Melanie took the time to answer a few of my pesky questions.

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As a writer (someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone), how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

Here’s a big surprise from one writer to another: I love to be alone.

Performance is one of my growing edges. Fortunately, I’ve had some good practice over the past several years as a magazine editor giving radio interviews, as an academic presenting papers, and as a parent reading bedtime stories and novels to my kids (I like to do voices). But it still doesn’t come easily to me. I have rituals for speaking or reading in public that involve lots of practice ahead of time, a realistic and meticulous plan, cozy and comfortable clothing, conscious breathing, etc.

My best reading-aloud experience was in a recording booth: I loved hearing my own voice so loud all around me, so full and clear. I aim for that sound whenever I read.

What do I get out of it? I get better for next time.

What do you want people to know about Happiness Threads: The Unborn Poems?

It’s a book of poems about mothering, and about the tension between making art and mothering.

It’s also a book about births and deaths—obvious ones like the births of children; hidden ones like the deaths of desire or of dreams; and the in-betweens like the never-asleep-never-awake state overtired parents live in, or the non-event of delivering a dead fetus. Late in the editing process for the book, I arrived at some lines for the prologue poem: “a mother’s job is to know / what matters and keep it alive // a poet’s job is to feel / for a pulse.” There are questions about life and death, what it means to really be alive, whose life matters, and who’s keeping track that surface again and again in the book.

It’s a feminist book, challenging the notion that women are completely fulfilled through motherhood. Winnipeggers struggled this summer to wrap their heads around the story of a “good” mother who drowned her children; these poems resist the image of the good, happy mother and show the dark and bright sides of (white, middle-class, Canadian) mothering. My poetry is influenced by feminist poetry and theory about motherhood. Readers will see references to the work of Sara Ahmed, Adrienne Rich, and Debbie Keahey; I was also reading Lola Tostevin, Nicole Brossard, Margaret Christakos, Susan Holbrook and other poet-theorists while working on the book and on the life-project of being a feminist mother.

When I started writing “the unborn poems,” poems that mourn the loss of a pregnancy, I was focused on capturing the raw grief I was dealing with at that time without falling into empty sentiment or cliché. I worked and reworked those poems, delivering them silently to my writing group for feedback—I couldn’t read the poems aloud. Reaching for language to describe the mixtures of beauty and pain, fulfillment and loss, happiness and depression experienced by a parent of young children became a focus for the whole project.

The book has five sections: the first three (“little bird,” “little pumpkin,” and “little guy”) are organized around the arrivals of three children; the fourth section, “happiness threads,” is a series of poems that play with the form of an online parenting forum; “love poems” look out with still-bleary eyes on the other side of the years of parenting infants and toddlers, assessing the damage and finding joy in unexpected places.

What would you tell a stranger about Winnipeg?

I’ve wanted to leave Winnipeg forever, yet I’m still here. When I meet someone who’s visiting Winnipeg I usually offer to tell them what they should do, then realize I’m not sure what to say. I tell them about whatever cultural events or festivals are coming up. Then I tell them about some parks to visit—the Whiteshell, the beaches, the city parks. Then the WAG and the other art galleries, then restaurants and neighbourhoods like Osborne, Corydon, and Wolseley.

I tell my hater relatives in Toronto that of course it’s cold and there are lots of mosquitoes, but I live within walking distance of downtown and grocery shopping and restaurants in a neighbourhood with giant elm trees. I can afford to make very little money because housing prices are low. I can see The Weakerthans perform at home, and almost all the people I love live here.

Tell about the pleasures and perils of academic writing and/or editing. (And how does it inform your poetry?)

So far, my experience has been that academic work sparks ideas and creativity for poetry. It was while I was doing my MA that many of the poems for this collection were written. I think I need the constant intake of new ideas—and it helps that I study literature. I’m inspired by innovative feminist poets, as well as YA novels and picture books. And, as I’ve already mentioned, I’m a geek about theory. Of course there are tough days and deadlines, but academic work is almost all pleasure for me, and the synergy with the poetry is a bonus.

Editing is another story. I find writing and editing tap the same energy. When I’m busy editing for work (most recently for Geez magazine, also as a freelance copy editor and proofreader), I don’t write, at least not poetry. I write editorials, blog posts, newsletters, and book reviews. I like the editing work a lot, but I have to reserve some time and energy for poetry.

I’ve seen how a mediocre piece can become something really terrific with help from a good editor. I have appreciated having excellent editors like Clarise Foster and Catherine Hunter, who ask the right questions and push me to make the poems and the whole project better.

For the past few years, you’ve been working amidst/among visual artists. Specifically, visual artists who are mothers. Were you ever tempted to throw away language and start working with paint or clay instead?

No, I’m too uptight to switch like that, although I love working in visual media. I think visual artists are more comfortable moving between media—the fact that they studied painting or ceramics in art school doesn’t keep them from writing a poem or doing a performance piece.

The Mother Artists’ group at Mentoring Artists for Women’s Art has challenged me to do poetry as visual art. For a show last year, I typed and stitched a poem onto flannel fabric; this year, I wrote a poem I was working on for the book, “petit point (by royal albert),” on a china plate. The “happiness threads,” which I wrote in collaboration with my artist friends, began with a visual concept; I worked within the constraints of my own online forum to generate plain-text poems with emoticons and a customized colour palette.

It reminds me that poetry is visual art. I think I have more affinity with the visual artists than fiction writers, and for now I workshop my poetry almost exclusively with my MAWA group (I don’t have a writing group right now). I’m working on paying even more attention to the visual aspects of my poems, and also on poetry as performance.

Over the last few years, I’ve seen writers who’ve worked with tech-based constraints such as the poem-in-140 characters or the prose-poem-as-daily-status-update. But you’ve elected to work with a form that is simultaneously loose and tight – the newsgroup or chat room. Lots of abbreviations, yes? But also endless midnight threads...were there any challenges working with/from this particular form?

The funny thing is, I’m a bit of a luddite—a Facebook abstainer and cell-phone-ophobe. When my second child was born I realized I needed to be able to get my hands free once in awhile so I wanted to learn how to wear my fussy baby in a sling or other baby carrier. So, I joined the Winnipeg Babywearers, a group that meets monthly and also has an online forum.

When I started on the forum, I was completely lost. I’d never done online chatting or anything like that before. The abbreviations the mothers used—the babywearers were all women—puzzled me. Think LOL, IMO, etc., plus a whole bunch of parenting- and babywearing-specific language. For example, I could tell DH meant something husband, but what was that something? I had a lot of fun imagining funny acronyms that were much more interesting than the saccharine “dear husband,” “dear daughter,” “dear son” translations I eventually found in an online glossary. I never really got into using abbreviations, but I did become a frequent poster on the forum, asking questions, sharing tips and recipes, and relating to a whole circle of friends I would have been lucky to recognize in a face-to-face encounter.

In some ways, we were an excellent support system for one another. But there were negatives: already isolated and lonely, spending my days with little children and my nights copy editing in my house, the forum became another thing that kept me from making healthier choices for myself, like going out or writing poetry. Plus, I was tired of the gender politics (where were the dads?), the heteronormative environment, the middle-class privilege and racism tied up in the collection of expensive and exotic baby gear.

It was not long after I finally gave up the forum that I had the idea for the “happiness threads.” My art group at MAWA had been talking about doing an artwork a day for a month. I pitched the idea to start right away and I began writing poems based around the acronyms from the forum. I had a list of the ones I wanted to use and I just went. I’d never had such a concrete plan for a series of poems before, nor had I ever been so prolific.

The play with the abbreviations didn’t really feel like a constraint, although I was certainly thinking of the procedural work of poets like Margaret Christakos and Rachel Zolf when I came up with the idea. I did begin with all plain-text formatting (no italics or underlines or other fancy stuff, except, of course, emoticons), but I have had to bend a bit on that to make sure the threads can be interpreted by readers.

The “happiness threads” were easy to write, but are they easy to read? That’s been the challenge. I wrote the poems cumulatively, assuming the reader knows all the abbreviations that come before each poem. If you read them in order, you should be able to decipher all of the coded language without using the glossary. But when we made the book we decided to put the glossary first so that readers know it’s there if they need it. I’ll be curious to see what people think of it.

At an early stage in the project, I made a poster of the poems with help from a designer at the U of W, then put it up in an academic show on campus. One of my old babywearer buddies who had also been on the forum read and loved it. In a way, I think the poems are a success if they resonate with the speakers of the specialized language I was writing in, but I hope other readers will also be able to find a way into the language. Or maybe they can make up their own meanings like I did.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

For work, I just finished reading Difference and Repetition by Gilles Deleuze. For fun, I’m reading The Sacrifice by Adele Wiseman—a modern Canadian novel and a Governor General’s Award winner in the 1950s. It’s about a Jewish immigrant family that escapes pogroms in Europe only to face more hardship in Canada. With the kids, I’m reading C. S. Lewis’s Narnia series.

I wish I could tell you about the great poetry project I’m working on, but I feel I’m between projects just now. The Happiness Threads book collects ten years’ worth of poems on the theme of mothering, and now I’m ready for something new. I’ve finished my term as a magazine editor, finished the introduction to an academic book I’m working on, sent the kids off for their first day of school, and now it’s time to figure out what comes next. For the next several months, I’ll be blogging for Rhubarb magazine at rhubarbmag.com/blog.

Unicity: Katherena Vermette

Katherena Vermette has been a part of Winnipeg's writing and publishing community for a long time. She's an active member of Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba and has worked for both Thin Air, Winnipeg International Writers Festival AND the Writers' Collective of Manitoba.

But Kate was always a writer-who-organized. And so her North End Love Songs was more than another line on her CV: it was the reason she did everything else. (Even though the everything-else probably kept her from writing more often than not...)

Long-awaited first books forever!

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As a writer (i.e. someone whose artistic practice is predicated on time spent alone) how do you approach performance? What do you get out of it?

I was a very, very reluctant performer. I always knew I wanted to be a writer, but tried my best to do that without actually reading my stuff in public (hint: this is impossible). I actually quit my grade 11 Creative Writing class because there was an in-class performance (thinking on it, I’ve quit several classes that had a public speaking component. Bad, shy me!) I didn’t read my stuff until I was 26 and newly minted into the Aboriginal Writers Collective, and even then it was only cause they made me.

It’s still not my favourite thing to do, but it does get easier. It’s integral not only to promote your work, but also to polish your work. When you perform, you hear things in your work that you can’t catch when you’re alone. Even when you read aloud alone, it’s so different when you see people’s reactions, and when you interact with active listeners. It makes your work better. Also, you can’t do this job in a vacuum. You need to go outside and talk to people, you have to hear other work and let others hear yours. It makes everyone’s stuff better.

What do you want people to know about North End Love Songs?

Gah! I just hope they like the book. Really. It was a hard book to write. I have been playing with some of these poems for years. Others were brand new, born out of the intense project of trying to make a whole, real live book. It was such a weird process. I went deeper than I ever intended to go.

I want people to see some sort of truth in it too. I hope readers can relate to it, and get something out of it. I wanted to show a different perspective of inner city life, and create a space for empathy and understanding. Lofty goals, I know. Failing that, I just hope people like the poems.

What would you tell a stranger about Winnipeg?

It’s a great place for a walk in any season. It’s an easy place to find a nice cluster of trees. Every neighbourhood I know has a green space. I love that. And if you view it from above, it looks like a gigantic green park!

I also wish many Winnipeggers knew Winnipeg. As an extended group, we’ve managed to siege ourselves in different, sprawling neighbourhoods. We really have a beautiful core area with amazing houses and streets and people. I wish Winnipeg would invest in that rather than new subdivisions.

What are you reading right now? What are you writing right now?

Oh I love this question! Happy day. I am taking a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, so my world is reading and writing (when it’s not working and parenting anyway). One of my classes this year is Writing for Children, so I’m reading a lot of storybooks and teen fantasy novels, and loving it.

That and Jian Ghomeshi’s 1982 (I heart him a little bit more with every page).

Writing: I am writing a creative thesis in short story. The stories are also based in the North End/inner city Winnipeg. It’s sort of like a fictional companion to North End Love Songs, but the characters are bossing me around quite a bit, so I am not sure where this will end up.

I am also writing a lot of YA stuff for that class. That’s a lot more fun and balances out my serious, unwieldy north end stories.

And poetry, I am never very far away from poetry.

The elm canopy figures significantly in your book. What would the North End look like without its trees?

I would hate to see the North End without the elms. I picture it looking cold somehow. Bare and vulnerable like a shaved head. There are some streets in central Winnipeg that don’t have trees, like parts of Garfield Avenue in the West End, or, I think it’s Aubrey Street, in Wolseley. They are still gorgeous streets but look weird to me. It’s like they are naked.

The elms are a complex symbol. Most of them were planted around the turn of the 20th century. The urban planners wanted Winnipeg to look like a big city, like New York whose Central Park is full of planted American Elms. But like many things in Winnipeg, what was at first a symbol of colonialism and European settlement has now taken on a different meaning. For me, the elms have morphed and changed into something new, something reclaimed. They are a source of pride that is protected and cherished as precious nature in an otherwise concrete world.

Katherena Vermette’s first full length poetry collection, North End Love Songs (Muses’ Company) was released in September 2012. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in several literary magazines and compilations, including, Manitowapow: Aboriginal Writings from the Land of Water (Highwater 2012). She currently splits her time (and psyche) between working on her Master of Fine Arts degree, herding the cats of the Aboriginal Writers Collective of Manitoba, facilitating early literacy programs, and being an overbearing mother to two tweener girls.

* * *

This is the first installment of a new interview series I'm calling Unicity, which, according to Wikipedia, was a term used to refer to Winnipeg around 1972.

That was when the rural municipalities of Charleswood, Fort Garry, North Kildonan, and Old Kildonan, the Town of Tuxedo, the cities of East Kildonan, West Kildonan, St. Vital, Transcona, St. Boniface, and St. James-Assiniboia were amalgamated into what we now know as Winnipeg.

The Chicago of the North. One Great City. Murder Capital of Canada. Winnerpeg.

The series runs parallel to my previous interview series, Out of Town Authors, but takes as its subjects local authors instead of visiting ones.

(In case you were wondering, Out of Town Authors was a victim of the recent cuts at the Winnipeg Free Press.)

My thanks to Kate for agreeing to the interview. She represents the North End beautifully.