Jean Van Loon talks to Sharon Berg about her latest poetry collection.
1. You say in a CKCU radio broadcast on July 22, 2022, that the poem ‘Fallout’ is the pivot of the book ‘Nuclear Family’. There are actually three ‘Fallout’ poems in the book, each presenting details in a voice that seems too calm given the documented fallout from the H-bombs. In those fictionalized but biographical poems, your father was lost to self-harm in ‘Fallout III’, yet he must have felt his innocence was lost long before this. That third poem includes reference to a quote by Edward Teller, the reputed ‘father of the H-bomb’ ostracized by the scientific community for portraying Oppenheimer as dangerous when he pushed for further development of the bomb Oppenheimer regretted being party to developing. The book as a whole suggests your father owned a greater sense of responsibility than other scientists recorded in history as being part its creation. How do you maintain a calm, determined voice when you lost your father to the repercussions of humans playing with Earth’s elements like they were God?
My book encompasses devastating events both public and private. For much of the work, I chose a spare and factual voice. You suggest it might be “too calm.” Others may agree. For me the facts themselves were so horrific that, if they were set forth in simple clarity, drama was embedded in them, needing no embellishment other than juxtaposition, rhythm, sound, and precise language. Another challenge was setting the family tragedy in the context of much vaster ones. I did not want to suggest an equality of scale. That’s why, in the context of the ‘Fallout’ poems you mention, I use the same voice for the lines related to the family as in the rest of the poem. I also inset those lines on the page, to suggest they are almost an aside in the context of the larger world. My father’s apparent guilt about his role in the advancement of nuclear weaponry was not unique. Many of the scientists in the Manhattan project shared his concern about what had been unleashed. The opening poem, ‘Hiroshima, After’ refers to two of them. Others, believing the only hope for mankind was for all countries to share the recipe for atomic weapons so none would be tempted to use them, deliberately gave away every secret they could.
2. Your poems ‘Sahtu Lake’ and ‘A Rock Is A Rock Is a Rock’ call to mind stories from my Cree friend, founder of the first Native Way School in Canada, Pauline Shirt. She was raised on a reserve close to a uranium mine in northern Alberta. All her siblings and herself suffered various cancers though none of them mined it. The entire reserve is riddled with cancers. The poems in your book that follow the two mentioned above are tense in their dance around the dangers of uranium presented as normal family interactions (i.e., ‘Jane Helps Check The Lab’ and ‘Big Pile’) but they all foreshadow a terrible result in poems like ‘Fission’ and ‘Drill’. You highlight even greater dangers in poems like ‘Cipher Clerk’. How have you kept your grasp on the story over the years since your childhood without losing your ability to calmly state its urgency?
I’m sad to learn of the damage radiation did to the community of your friend Pauline Shirt. Hers is not the only community affected. The dangers of exposure to radioactive materials are much better known today than they were in the 40s – or the 30s, when the Eldorado Mine on Great Bear Lake was first developed to meet the demand for radium. Uranium oxides created the green of household glassware (as on the cover of Nuclear Family) and the red of Fiesta tableware (referred to in the poem ‘Titles’) both widely used until the 40s. But even as evidence grew of what prolonged exposure to radiation could do to human health, people were slow to adopt adequate protective practices in the mining, shipping, and processing of radioactive materials. By now we have done some cleaning up of old sites, but still struggle to find safe and acceptable ways to dispose of waste materials from reactors used for energy and medical devices.
3. I hope my questions do not appear insensitive. I ask myself: How to fit a life time of questions and worries, laughter and joy, tragedy and recovery into the few pages of a poetry book? You seem to have achieved this feat and I wonder how much you attribute to the fact that you have waited until you are older and wiser to tell this tale of maturing through the repercussions on your family of your father’s career and his ultimate decision to end his llife?
You could say Nuclear Family took sixty years to write – years of internal composting and a number of unsuccessful writing attempts. Even after sixty years, some parts were painful to revisit, but at least the passage of time gave me distance – and better developed writing skills. My first book Building on River showed me it was possible to create a narrative in poetry, and that gave me the courage in this last attempt to make sense of my family’s story.
4. How do you intend for the value of the work to be assessed – as a piece of work that shares a compelling message or makes a social, political, or practical point or is it to be seen as a cultural event/phenomenon – an object of taste or a statement of your aesthetic?
I would like to have this book’s merits weighed in terms of the quality of the poetry – the writing itself and its emotional impact. Also, how well it conveys what it was like to grow up at a particular time and in a particular family uniquely affected by that time.
5. What books were you reading when you wrote this? Are there any books that you had to keep visiting for inspiration when writing this book?
Particularly helpful for research into the atomic era were Richard Rhodes’ exhaustive account of the Manhattan Project, The Making of the Atomic Bomb; John Hersey’s Hiroshima, the powerful witness of survivors of the Hiroshima bombing; and Michael Lista’s poetry book Bloom, which beautifully recreates the story of a Canadian scientist who died working in the New Mexico labs of the Manhattan Project. Interspersed with these, I read “pure poetry” books to remind me of what I aspire to – Alice Oswald’s Falling Up and Nobody for lines that are spare yet gorgeous and full of mystery; Robin Robertson’s Sailing the Forest: Selected Poems for vivid, visceral imagery often with a dark tinge.
6. How did you arrive at the title? What was your intention for the title to do?
The title arrived as I first started thinking about the book. To my astonishment, it never changed. I expected the publisher to want something different, but no. “Nuclear Family” refers first to the sociological unit of parents and children without extended family. This applied to my family since my father’s relatives – two siblings and their spouses and children – all lived in Winnipeg, which in the 50s was a long way away from our home in Ottawa. It was even far to telephone, expensive long-distance calls measured by the minute, words weighed in advance. My mother’s only sibling, though local, was a “confirmed bachelor,” hence no nearby cousins. The title also characterizes a family very much of the emerging nuclear age, with my father working on processing technologies for radioactive materials and with above-ground testing going on through much of my childhood. It also hints at the explosion in the heart of the family.
7. How long did the first draft take for you to write? What was the core of the developmental process between drafts, were you working on the structure or the story world or aspects of style and language or something else? In terms of sheer length what did the book look like after the first draft? Did the length change?
The first draft started at Sage Hill’s 2017 Spring Colloquium and continued when I came home, with the help and encouragement of my close poet friends of the Ruby Tuesday critique group. Then, when my first book was accepted for publication, I set the work aside for that book’s editing and promotion. I delayed returning to the nuclear manuscript because of its darkness and because I doubted anyone would want to read it. Then came Covid, and two good friends died of non-Covid causes. I decided it was now or never. I put together the first full draft in summer 2020. Subsequent versions reflected information and perspectives I gleaned after showing the draft to my brothers, as well as the advice of an admired Ottawa poet, David O’Meara. I had already cut away many of the family poems. On David’s advice I cut out another 12-15 poems. Then, another rigorous substantive edit. It was astonishing how I could instantly see problems with poems I had worked over many times before. By late 2020, I felt I had done my best with it and prepared to send it out. Of course, there was another productive round of editing with McGill-Queens’s Allan Hepburn!
8. How did you arrive at the form/structure of the work? Did you have a form/structure in mind when you started? What other forms/structures or shapes did you consider? What was driving your choices – efficiency or something else …style, urge for innovation, compulsions of the genre, compulsions of a literary movement it aspires to connect with?
At Sage Hill, when I initially pondered the form the book might take, I imagined the personal and historical poems floating like different planets or stars, not linked, not arranged in chronological order, but sharing space in a single constellation. As the work developed, a friend in the Ruby Tuesday group suggested putting a couple of lines into one of the historical poems to link it to the family. I tried that and liked how it worked. It seemed to strengthen both threads, so I went back and built a similar link into almost all the historical poems. As I arranged and rearranged the poems, I eventually concluded that a sequence hat was roughly chronological would work best, the historical and personal poems interwoven within that arc.
9. Are any aspects of the book autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) to avoid the dangers of straight autobiography?
The book deals with memories painful to me and my brothers. I strove to avoid a “poor me” tone or “revenge poetry” about our parents. Also, I tried to balance the dark poems with lighter, to provide a bit of readerly relief. To create enough distance to allow myself to write, I adopted fake names – Dick and Jane from the 1950s readers for a start, with the parents referred to only as Mum and Dad. When I resumed work on the manuscript after setting it aside, I resolved to be fully honest and adopted first person singular, my family having no names at all – just ‘Mum’ for example. I couldn’t bear to use actual names. When Allan Hepburn suggested that the roles without names made for a dull read after a while, I went back to the fake names, invented ones for my parents, and changed several poems to third person. It was amazing how the characters became more distinctive, the poems more alive. Some poems felt so important emotionally, however, that I concluded they should stay first person. So the final manuscript moves back and forth from “I” to “Jane.”
10. Are there poems/ideas that were originally intended but ultimately not included in the collection? How did you determine what to keep and what to remove from the collection?
There are loads of poems originally written toward this book which are not included: poems of childhood, of the construction of our new house, of the 1950s driveway car-washing ritual, the arrival of our first TV (black and white, with only one English and French CBC channel to view). And some poems about looking back. Two things helped me sort. Some poet friends observed that the shorter the better for a powerful impact, and that made sense to me. David O’Meara echoed that thought and recommended that whenever two or more poems covered a particular moment or topic, I should pick the best and toss the rest. I did. (Well, almost always.)
JEAN VAN LOON has published short prose, poetry, and reviews in Canadian literary magazines across the country. Her second poetry book, Nuclear Family, was published in April 2022 by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Her first collection, Building on River (Cormorant Books, 2018) was a finalist for the Ottawa Book Award. Her story, “Stardust,” published in the Queen’s Quarterly, was selected for Journey Prize Stories 19. She holds a graduate diploma in creative writing from the Humber School of Writing and an MFA from the University of British Columbia, and attended the Sage Hill Poetry Colloquium in 2017.