Author of Straddle (and other works) talks to Sabyasachi Nag about her craft and artisanal habits.
1. Mobile, your fourth collection of poetry, has been described (in a different interview) as a “collection about the ways women move through spaces, both physically and emotionally.” And then, about your latest non-fiction title Straggle, you say, it is about “who gets to walk freely through our cities, parks, and wilderness”. The titles were published two years apart. Would it be accurate to surmise that the two titles are thematically centered on the idea of mobility? Were the titles crafted around the same time? Did the two titles, varied as they are in form, feed each other in any way? Do you
find writing simultaneously in multiple genres generative in any way?
Thanks for this question, and it absolutely is accurate to think about Mobile and Straggle together – two different explorations of what it means, materially and politically for women and other vulnerable people to take up space, to move, observe, seek and practice connection – published within a few years of each other. There was definitely some overlap in when and how they were written, both books – products of more than ten years of reading, study, and writing. But I finished Mobile first, inspired in part by a number of poets I admire, who were writing about what it means to move through a city. But once Mobile was published, I had so much more to say! I consider Mobile the text that unlocked Straggle.
2. About The Daughter’s Way: Canadian Women’s Paternal Elegies, Shoshannah Ganz suggests that the central idea/ theme is about creativity and/or productivity in women poets by “refusing resolution” in the mourning process and opposing the Freud-inspired “cultural mandate of closure”. What prompted you to write the book? How did you conceive of the four-part structure?
The Daughter’s Way was a long project; I wrote part of it as my doctoral dissertation at the University of Victoria, and then added several more chapters before its publication as a monograph. I received some pushback when I was writing it, as some people thought it wasn’t exciting to examine feminist creativity and the (mostly male) elegiac tradition. Then – a terrible thing, but it shows how quickly things can change – 9/11 happened and the ensuing cultural conversation in North America about personal grief, public mourning, and art-making through grief made my manuscript suddenly topical. The structure was born of my interest in sussing out which female poets were pushing the particular boundaries of the paternal elegy and when they were doing it: mid-century, during the era of cultural nationalism, or in a firmly feminist era at the century’s end. Though this was a genre study, a historical foundation – especially because I was writing about feminist writers – was important.
3. What prompted GUSH: menstrual manifestos for our times? Can you describe some of the editorial considerations that might have gone in the making of the collection? Thematically speaking, was there anything in particular, or anything in general that you and your fellow editors were looking at in the works of “writers, representing four generations of menstruators” as you went about building this collection?
Ariel Gordon had the idea for GUSH, prompted in part by a male writer’s disgusted response to a period poem that she wrote. There hadn’t been an anthology of writing about menstruation published by a Canadian press in 15 years, and Ariel and Rosanna Deerchild and I – as the editing team – wanted GUSH to be multi-genre, multi-generational, and multi-perspective. We chose pieces that cut a broad swath through experience; menstruation doesn’t mean one thing to everyone who experiences it. It shifts between generations and happens within the parameters of poverty and class imposed on culture. Many of Indigenous contributors noted that shame about menstruation was a colonial imposition, and another piece addressed the value of menstruating as a Jewish woman during and after the Holocaust: evidence of life, of survival. We chose pieces from trans and nonbinary folks who menstruate while maintaining identities that are not exclusively female. Several pieces were written by people living with chronic illnesses that complicated their menstrual cycle. We found some cool surprises along the way: S.M. Beiko’s hilarious supernatural fiction, Katie McGarry’s space-travel poem, Erica Violet Lee’s poem about water ceremonies. It’s a truly eclectic anthology.
4. How did you come to write your first book?
It all happened because I needed to make good on something I said to Helen Humphreys. I had been writing poetry and attending workshops to improve my craft for about three or four years, publishing fairly frequently in lit mags and gaining some confidence. Then, one night at her evening class, Helen asked me, “You’ve got a manuscript in your bottom drawer, right? Are you sending it out?” In the manner of a good student who does not want to disappoint, I stammered “why, yes!” I didn’t have a manuscript: more like a snarl of 150 pages in no real order. So I had lied but thought that it wouldn’t be a real lie if I got that manuscript together shortly after: what a rationalization! I put that first manuscript together to call my own bluff, and worked on it steadily for another few years, had it rejected a few times, and then it was published by a small independent press.
5. Do you remember any experience around learning to write that became formative for you in the later years?
I was accepted into the Sage Hill Writing Experience before my first book came out and thought I had died and gone to Heaven. It was the beginning of thinking of writing differently, as something that I didn’t have to fight for or justify as my weirdo hobby but could gather with like-minded people not just for an hour, but for ten whole days, and the big questions would be what I was writing and how I was writing it. I’ve been on many other retreats since, as an instructor and as a learner, but that first time at Sage Hill shook me up in the best way.
6. What was the most satisfying aspect of your recently completed work?
For me, the process of writing Straggle was very freeing for the way I write prose. It’s not like I didn’t have my moments when I wrestled with form and other matters, but writing about foot pain, falling, and misidentifying birds all felt subversive like I was telling weird but essential truths about how I live my life. I have always done that in poetry – I mean, poetry is made for such weird essential truths – but it felt very enlivening to that do with prose!
7. Would you consider your writing practice as an interdependent activity, something that is sustained by contributions from people around you?
Sometimes I think people want to be writers so they don’t have to deal with other people. And I am no exception. But Egad, it is HARD to sustain a writing practice without art-making friends. I have been, at several points in my life, very artistically lonely, and that has always been my own fault for telling myself the big lie that I can just write what I write and don’t need anyone else. This works for a short period of time and then it starts to go sideways and I start to wonder why I feel so terrible. So I am sustained by my partner who is a mad tech genius and makes beautiful videos of my work, my writing friends with whom I talk every week about what we are making, my three writing groups who generously offer feedback, Lynda Barry’s books about drawing and writing, my students who ask good questions and keep me out of my own head.
8. Can you recall an experience where you might have worked with another poet/writer or maybe you collaborated with a visual artist, or a performing artist (say a musician/actor/dancer) – how was that experience different or similar? Or seminal or generative?
I performed for a fundraiser for Mysterious Barricades one year and bass clarinet player Kathryn Ladano accompanied my reading. Kathryn just blew me away with her improvisational skills and the ways she found the music to support the poem. I felt like we were a single being. That’s the power of collaborative generosity.
A practice I love is exchanging pieces with another writer at a live reading event, so they read my work aloud and I read theirs. I read other poets’ work aloud all the time in the classroom, so I am always happy to do that and to give the other poet the vulnerable, exhilarating, dissociative experience of being read in this way. There is something so strange and wonderful about hearing your words coming out of someone else’s mouth. I did this first with Yvonne Blomer and Jenna Butler and had to restrain myself from cackling wildly when I heard their readings of a cheeky snarky poem I had written. Then Sarah Tolmie and I did this at a joint event we did for Knife Fork Book in the winter of 2021. It is so simple to do, yet so dizzying. I recommend it!
9. Do you train your subconscious in certain ways to deal with success or rejection?
I often “prepare for rejection” by talking myself out of writing about subjects that make me vulnerable. But that can be pretty confining. When I wrote the essay in Straggle that addressed my history of panic attacks, it was a clear case of me wanting and fearing the same thing: what if people knew this about me? So I dared myself to show the draft to my writing group, and I didn’t die of shame, so then I dared myself to send it out for publication. I had the extreme good fortune of having Katherine Barrett of Atlantis print the essay before it appeared in Straggle and Katherine made essays from that issue available online, so I had the happy surprise of seeing how much it was welcomed by readers. That’s one way to prepare for a book’s impact on you: publish parts of it beforehand. Choose your venue and publisher well. Let your writing community support you.
10. What is your definition of a successful piece of writing? Who decides that?
Isn’t that the biggest question, eh? In the end, the author has to determine the piece’s success, because the author has to be able to get to sleep at night. Literary success is slippery, in so many ways, and it’s not always the best thing to look at commercial earnings to determine success. I mean, capitalism is out there affirming that definition of success all the time, so I think it’s up to us to consider our artistic joy. I like getting big audiences and a wide readership as much as anyone, and loving the act of creation and loving a paycheque co-exist, but they are not the same actions. I write this as someone with a steady paycheque from teaching writing, so pass the grain of salt, please. The best discussion I’ve heard about this recently has been Carmen Maria Machado’s article on Substack in which she examines ambition, the rush to publish, and literary business.
Author Bio
Tanis MacDonald is the author of seven books, including Mobile: poems and the essay collection Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female. She has won the Open Seasons Awards for Nonfiction, the Bliss Carman Prize for Poetry, and the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award. She is the Editor of the Laurier Poetry Series and hosts the podcast Watershed Writers. She is originally from Treaty One territory in Winnipeg, and lives in Waterloo, Ontario, on the traditional territories of the Neutral, Anishnaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript titled Tall, Grass, Girl.