Ottawa poet Laura Farina, talks to AW’s Sabyasachi Nag about her craft and artisanal habits.

SN: In your second poetry collection “Some Talk of Being Human”, you interrogate the idea of ‘home’. What prompted this inquiry? And how did you catalogue your ideas and translate them into the poems?

LF: I’m not usually a poet who goes into a manuscript with an idea of what I’m doing, rather I just start writing poems and once enough of them pile up, I’m able to identify the questions and preoccupations that are driving them. For me, the best moments of writing are the ones where I stumble into a moment of realization and I’m finally able to articulate a thought or feeling that’s been simmering below the surface of me for a while.

I wrote Some Talk of Being Human in the decade that spanned my late twenties and early thirties. During that time I lived in six cities in six years, and I think I was slowly coming to the realization that if I wanted a home, I was going to have to make it myself. How to go about doing that was the preoccupation at that time.

I kept a lot of notebooks during that time, where I’d jot things down as they came to me.  I also, for a chunk of that time, had a practice where I’d write a poem every day — so snippets of those daily poems also made their way into the book.

SN: In “Some Talk of Being Human” doors and frame; wind and windows appear in several poems as a recurring idea (reminding me of Adrienne Rich’s collection “The Fact of the Doorframe”) was this conscious? How does the idea of space co-exist with the idea of home in your mind?

LF: Oh no!  You aren’t supposed to notice that! I am obsessed with windows. It’s a real problem.  I just finished reading The Book of Grief and Hamburgers by Stuart Ross, and in it he writes that any time he feels uncomfortable about the emotions in his poems, he throws in a hamburger just to lighten things up. I think any time I feel like I’m getting too confessional, I throw in a window, to sort of say, “Hey reader, I don’t mind you lurking out there, but there’s going to be this pane of glass between us. This far and no further!”

One of the things I’m currently trying to learn in my writing is how to be a bit more in control of the play between withholding and disclosing — but I just did a search and there are eight windows in my current manuscript, so I guess I have a ways to go yet.

SN: “Some Talk of Being Human” traverses Toronto, Banff, Ottawa, South Bend and Vancouver – why these places? And what does place mean to you? And how do you see these places in relation to time? Do these places referenced in this collection stay frozen forever or do they hatch and evolve in time?

LF: The places in Some Talk of Being Human are just the places I lived while I wrote the poems.  I think the places as they are set down on the page feel quite distant to me now. I’ve revisited a number of them over the years, but I don’t really think of them in relation to the poems. They are places I used to live, with the normal “That’s where the video store used to be, and that’s where Aaron lived” kind of tour guiding associated with them.  I don’t think I’ve ever thought “That’s the house I wrote that poem about”.  I wonder why not?

SN: You published “This Woman Alphabetical” Pedlar Press, 2005 very early in your career. How did that early success influence your later career?

LF: This is a doozy of a question. I remember sitting across from my publisher, Beth Follett, at her home in Toronto and her asking me, “Are you ready for your life to change?” and I didn’t even think about it, I just said, “Yes!”  Truthfully, that book did change my life, I got to read, spend time with, and work with a bunch of writers I admire. I learned a lot about poetry in the years that followed the publication of my first book.

For a while, I was sort of embarrassed by This Woman Alphabetical, because I felt like I’d grown a lot as a writer since its publication, and I worried that maybe I’d published it too early and that I should have waited to get better at writing poetry (and maybe also at being a person) before taking the plunge. Now I realize that I’m just always going to feel that way about my work. I feel that way about the poems in Some Talk of Being Human compared to the poems I’m working on now, for example.  I think maybe publication just captures a moment in time — and like looking back on an old photograph, you’re simultaneously embarrassed by what you’re wearing and also proud of your past self for having the guts to put herself out there like that.

SN: Charles Bukowski suggested poetry should come out of “out of your heart / and your mind / and your mouth/ and your gut” and while they are all parts of the body they mean different things. Where does your poetry come from – a happy, loud and chaotic place or a dark, silent and still place? Does the place of poetry in a poet’s work remain static forever or does it change?

LF: Oh, some kind of gut-mind combo, maybe? I’m not sure.  I’ve been collaborating a lot lately with my five-year-old, and I’ve noticed that the moments in our collaborations that make me the most excited are the ones where he asks a question. For example, the other day in a poem we were working on he asked…

There are dog beaches

but why aren’t there cat beaches?

I had this image of what a cat beach would be like — just a bunch of cats sitting around pretending not to care about being at the beach, and it was so funny to me and I wanted to follow that logic as far as it would go.

So maybe my poems come from a place of questions. 

SN: What made you a poet?

LF: Poetry is the best way I’ve found to think about and express the way I am in the world. I’m a really quick person (I think quickly and talk quickly), but I have a number of chronic illnesses, that force me to move through the world slowly.  That tension between my fast brain, flitting from thing to thing, and my slow body lumbering down the road is the tension at the centre of pretty much everything I write.

SN: How did you come to write your first book?

LF: I was working at a summer camp for the arts, assisting Beth Follett, who was teaching writing. Beth gave me a copy of Stuart Ross’ book Farmer Gloomy’s New Hybrid and my brain exploded. At that point I hadn’t written in over a year, but all of a sudden all these surreal poems came out of me in a huge rush — Stuart’s book completely changed the way I approached writing.

Beth was the publisher of Pedlar Press and at the end of our third summer working together she asked me, “Do you have a manuscript?”  I did not, but I said “Yes.” And then I scrambled over the course of the next year or so to put something together. That became This Woman Alphabetical.

SN: What specific incident incited/inspired your last piece of work (of any form or length)?

LF: I finished a poem this week that started off years ago as a list of possible titles for exceedingly boring Harry Potter novels — stuff like “Harry Potter and the Items that Did Not Sell at the Garage Sale” and “Harry Potter and the Ubiquitous Klimt Poster”.  Then…let me think. I think I turned it into an abecedarian because I thought a form would help. Then it turns out J.K. Rowling is a shitty person so I changed all the Harry Potters into “The Case of”s  so they sounded sort of like Nancy Drewesque mystery titles — “The Case of the Flavour of the White Freezie,” for example.

There’s a moment in most things I write where I have to remind myself — “Don’t be clever. Don’t go for the joke.”  The poem was basically all jokes, but I was having a hard time letting it go. I abandoned the form and started to think about moments in my life that I circle back to in my thinking, that continue to nag at me, but I don’t totally understand why.  What about these moments eludes me?  What’s the mystery there? 

The poem as it is now is super personal — but guess what?  No windows!

SN: Would you consider your writing practice as an interdependent activity, something that is sustained by contributions from people around you?

LF: Yes, in all sorts of ways.

My all-time favourite way to write is with other writers — all of us just working silently on our own projects, but together.  There’s a particular kind of silence that comes when people are focused on making stuff that I find so inspiring. I am easily distracted, and I love to talk, so these moments are very hard for me to come by, but when they happen, hoo boy.

In my day job I’m the program manager of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. That means I spend a good portion of my time talking with other writers about writing, and I find those conversations sustaining.

I rely on a poetry critiquing group I have with Ram Randhawa, Mark Hoadley and George Shindler.

I’m also a huge stealer of things people say to me that I think are beautiful. My husband and son, in particular, are glorious and gorgeous speakers.

SN: How do you know as a poet/writer if a piece of work that you have been labouring on, is finally completed?

LF: I think the only way I know is that I become a bit sick of it, and all the changes I make to it just keep making it worse.

Author Bio

Laura Farina is the author of two poetry collections, Some Talk of Being Human and This Woman Alphabetical, as well as the chapbooks Diagnostic Tool and Choose Your Own Poem.