Ashley Opheim is a poet, editor, and founder of the intersectional feminist literary press, Metatron. In 2014, Opheim published her first book of poetry, I Am Here. Last year, Opheim landed the emerging publishers grant from the Canada Council. Opheim’s Metatron and its sister blog, ÖMËGÄ, publish contemporary writing drawn from an international crowd.

Have you always been good at writing?

 I’ve always been interested in communicating. When I was a kid I would strike conversation up with literally anyone anywhere and babble on about whatever was on my mind. I was obsessed with reading and escaping everyday life through stories. I think that my curiosity in communication and my fascination with the imagination naturally led me to writing, and I think that the curiosity that drives my writing has naturally led me to do it a lot, read a lot and therefore get better at communicating my ideas in somewhat interesting ways.
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Photo credit: Michael Stevens.

Interviewed by Kyla Jamieson

Adèle Barclay published her début collection of poetry, If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You, to widespread acclaim in the fall of 2016. A poem from this collection, written—like many of Barclay’s poems—for one of her close friends, won the 2016 Walrus Reader’s Choice Award for poetry. Accepting the award, Barclay wrote, “That a poem predicated on friendship and survival managed to charm enough people to win the Readers’ Choice Award is inspiring to me—it feels right considering the nature of our love and politics.”

An early version of the manuscript that became If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You was shortlisted for the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry in 2015; this recognition helped Barclay land a contract with her collection’s publisher, Nightwood Editions. In 2016, Barclay won the Lit POP Award for Poetry—her prize included publication and a trip to Montreal for the POP Montreal International Music Festival because, as Barclay put it, “they know if they give writers money they’ll just spend it on rent.” Not long after our interview, it was announced that If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out for You was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, a BC Book Prize that acknowledges the author of the year’s best poetry collection.

We spoke in Barclay’s kitchen, where she’d generously assembled a spread of cheeses, crackers, and nougat sourced from shops in her Commercial Drive neighbourhood. We discussed her education and influences, the ambient intimacy of texting, and not being an asshole. After our conversation, Barclay offered to read my tarot from a nautically themed deck, with her laptop open to assist. I emerged from the experience and into Vancouver’s uncharacteristic snow feeling much as I do when I surface from reading Barclay’s poems—hopeful and affirmed, a little less alone amidst the complexities and contradictions of contemporary existence.

Let’s start with your education. Having recently received your PhD in English, you’ve reached the height of academic achievement. It seems like the MFA is a more common route for poets to take, at least in Canada. Why did you choose the path you pursued?

It’s sort of just how it worked out. I actually started in Science at Queen’s then migrated to English. I did my Master’s at McGill, where I was definitely more on the periphery of the creative writing scene but went to a lot of events, took in a lot, and made friends with people like my friend Klara Du Plessis—we were both Master’s students and now we’re poets in the world. Then for some reason I decided to do a PhD. I graduated during the recession, so at the time academia was the most lucrative direction to go in. I took a chance on BC—I came out here to study at UVic and during the beginning of my PhD my writing took a huge dip. I was deeply uninspired. Everything I wrote, I was like, “This is awful.”
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Interviewed by Cameron Sharpe

Alysia Nicole Harris is an internationally known performance artist and poet hailing from Alexandria, Virginia. She is a Cave Canem fellow, founding member of the performance poetry collective The Strivers Row, and co-founder of the start-up Artist Inn Detroit. Alysia has toured in Canada, Germany, Slovakia, South Africa, and the UK and has spoken at the United Nations. Two-time Pushcart nominee, and two-time winner of the 2015 and 2014 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize, Alysia’s poems have appeared in Indiana Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, Vinyl, and Best New Poets 2015. Her work has been anthologized in The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2015, she was also selected as the Duncanson Artist-in-Residence at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. 

Her first success as a writer and a performer was when she was a member of the winning 2007 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI). In 2008, she was featured on the

HBO documentary Brave New Voices, a slam poetry competition for kids from 13 through 19 years old. In 2014, Alysia received her MFA in poetry from NYU and Ph.D. in linguistics at Yale where she was a Bouchet Honor Society Graduate Fellow.

I was fortunate enough to get in contact with her through email while she was touring the UK and interview her through Google Hangout when she got home to Atlanta.

What brought you to poetry?

We have ways of thinking and how the world makes sense to us and we do not have a name for these things when we are young. We just know that is how we think. Obviously from training you get better and better at your skills, you get that natural impulse. I feel like with poems, I love writing and love words and I was obsessed with them. I would just write lists of names, but they weren’t really names but list of words. I loved the way they sounded and they launched my imagination to different places and to different ideas and so when my teacher in fifth grade showed my English class what a poem was, I was like “Oh I do that, that’s the name for, what happening up here in my brain.” I was like “Oh, that’s who I am! That’s what I am. I do that” And from there it was just getting better and practicing and spending time doing it. 

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Interviewed by Mariah Devcic

Annelyse Gelman is a poet currently based in Berlin. Her collection of poems Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Gelman’s EP (under the name Shoulderblades) is available on Bandcamp and is proof that she is truly a maker of all kinds. Further proof can be found with her poems in the New Yorker, the Indiana Review, and Poetry is Dead, as well as her collaboration with artist Stephen Whisler, and many other places/media.

I emailed Gelman after reading her book countless times and keeping up with her other work through a monthly newsletter. I was interested in her inspiration and process because of the momentum of Gelman’s work at large. She let me in on a few of the ways she stays curious, and why she doesn’t always try to force creativity.

How have your inspirations and influences changed from before the book to now? How has publication changed your process?

The way my work and its influences changes over time feels pretty fluid to me – evolving along a path that’s revealed as I proceed, shaped by many different forces. There’s not really a meaningful demarcation between “before the book” and “after the book”; in many ways, the timing of publishing in the first place was fairly arbitrary. There’s a constantly mutating body of work, and at some point you just stop and make a cast of that body’s current shape. A fossil of something still living? These mutation-cast cycles will proceed regardless of when, or whether, I publish.

There’s definitely some pressure now to create something new and different – nobody wants to write the same book twice – but I’d be wary of repeating myself even if I never published Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone. I’m always trying to do something I’ve never done before; I imagine this is true of most artists. I’m probably also more patient – I just want to do the best work I can, as hard as I can, and I’m not too worried about how long that takes. My process was – and still is – to follow my curiosity and confusion and excitement, and see where that takes me. Sometimes that means poems that naturally want to gel together (like the Naked Lunch centos, or this series of site-specific pieces “set” in New Mexico, or when I find myself drawn to certain forms or tones), and more often it results in standalone pieces that haven’t really found a place in a larger project yet.

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Interviewed by Selina Boan

Born on the Saddle Lake Reserve in Two Hills, Alberta in 1953, Louise Bernice Halfe is the award winning author of four poetry collections. Her books Bear Bones and Feathers, Blue Marrow, The Crooked Good and Burning in this Midnight Dream have received numerous distinctions and awards. Her work has been shortlisted for Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther Award, and the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, among others.

In addition to writing, Louise holds a bachelor of Social Work from the University of Regina and has travelled across Canada and abroad doing readings and presenting her work. She was Saskatchewan’s Poet Laureate for 2005-2006 and currently lives outside Saskatoon with her husband, dogs, cats, and chickens. Her Cree name is Sky Dancer and she is a proud mother and grandmother.

I have long admired Halfe’s poetry and return to her work often for its attention to sound, texture, and celebration of the Cree language. Re-reading her latest poetry collection, Burning in this Midnight Dream, I was struck once again by the rhythm of her words, by the presence of the body, and the power of truth, storytelling, and witness. It was an honour to interview Louise through email correspondence and talk with her about the significance of dreams, the challenges of life as a poet, and the musical dance of the Cree language.

I am curious to hear how you came to poetry, what was it that initially drew you in and what inspired you to pursue writing?

I didn’t choose poetry. Poetry came nodding its head in when I was keeping a journal. The journal writing kept calling to me and was reinforced by dreams and ceremony.

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Interviewed by Patrick Murray

Garth Martens won the 2011 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His first book Prologue for the Age of Consequence (Anansi, 2014) was a Finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry. His poems have appeared in publications like Poetry Ireland Review, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Geist, Vallum, Fiddlehead, Prism, Grain, and Best Canadian Poetry in English. In collaboration with Alma de España Flamenco Dance Company, he wrote and performed the libretto for Pasajes, an international production staged in 2014 at the Royal Theatre.

For nine years Martens has worked in large-scale commercial construction throughout northern Alberta and interior British Columbia. As another writer who has worked in the oil patches of northern Alberta, and who dried up as a creative force in that environment, I was particularly interested in what drove him to keep writing, let alone maintain inspiration, in such a rugged and muscular environment. His book Prologue for the Age of Consequence is almost entirely concerned with the world of the tar sands, and the lives of those who work within it. I also couldn’t ignore his penchant for Flamenco, and what thoughts he might bring to bear on “cross-pollination” in the arts.

First off, and it’s a little belated, but congratulations on your book Prologue for the Age of Consequence. It is intensely, darkly beautiful, and can leave one quite staggered at times. Obviously the book draws a lot from your experiences in the tar sands, the oil patches of Alberta. Having worked there myself, and as another creative person, I related quite fully. But I also had questions. Did these poems start coming to you unexpectedly while you were already ensconced in that world, or did you have an idea that a project like this would emerge beforehand? Perhaps discussing what led you to seek work out there in the first place, and the alternating experiences living up there and living in Victoria.

Thanks, Patrick. That’s kind of you. In 2006, I was working a lookout tower in Lac la Biche under the header of Alberta Wildfire Management, and sharing the gig with a girlfriend. Although losing at cards, killing mosquitoes, and growing paranoid about phantom smoke and stray figures in the birch were all formative experiences, the pay split in half didn’t amount to much. Through a contact in Edmonton I was hired on with a large-scale commercial construction company, and subsequently worked at several job sites up until late 2014. I didn’t anticipate writing about it. I didn’t want to. A few years later, after an especially exhausting stint in construction, I wrote a prose poem in the voice of a labourer. Soon I had the terrain for a unified manuscript. In tandem I read Beowulf, Gilgamesh, and The Divine Comedy, which shaped certain choices at an early stage.

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