Moving to Delilah

Emily Cann talks to Edmonton poet Catherine Owen about her latest collection, Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books, 2024)

Emily Cann (EC): In this collection, there is a kind of archival tendency: found poems like “1905: Four Headlines Each Month” preserve and build upon newspaper headlines, other poems like “The Book Box: 12 months in 13 parts” act as a different kind of calendar—and then there is the history of Delilah in poems like “Uncoveries: haibuns on renovating a garage” and “Forms of Knowledge: The Census.” What is your process for undertaking this archival work? How do you decide what to preserve and/or what inspires you to preserve it?

Catherine Owen (CO): When you purchase a 1905 house, I think the tendency, as a writer certainly, would be to want to know the history of the home: inhabitants, renovations, the context of the house within the original neighbourhood. For the newspaper headlines and census material, I spent quite a bit of time in the local archives and online, seeking (sometimes desperately) for anything on this often unrecorded era. And it wasn’t easy as material from 1905-1908, in particular, was very hard to locate. The book box and garage history was a process of having it built and tearing it down, respectively, then seeing what narratives each unfolded. I just open myself to the organic knowledge that writing a book always seems to bring and trust in whatever directions I’m given in terms of content and form. Poets are so often nostalgia freaks and thus natural preservationists.

EC: Throughout the collection, the house is a key image and figure. It appears both as a kind of sanctuary and as a kind of prison (I think in particular of “Constraints & Melancholia, 2020”). How did you navigate this tension while writing? How much did your experience during the pandemic inform your approach?

CO: I don’t think ownership is simple and without doubt leaving the city one was born and raised in to move to a city in which difficult things happened, such as one’s partner dying, is definitely hard. Edmonton is full of wonderful arts scenes and warm people but I moved back here to buy a house primarily because I could afford to (barely) and I knew that the house-owning world was forever closed to me in prohibitively pricy Vancouver. So it is a bittersweet land and purchase for me, both an exquisite freedom and an indubitable prison, because I know I will never live in my homeland again. A fact that was undoubtedly emphasized by the pandemic when I couldn’t even fly back for a visit to my family for months on end. And of course I spent even more time than I would have in Delilah then, renovating and growing a garden and rooting myself in this reality. Life-altering decisions of any kind are complex and I wanted these poems to reflect that conflictual (and still beautiful) position.

EC: In “Layers,” you write of being a poet and experiencing “a line arriving in the blood” and then the “urgency” to write it down. Did any of the lines or poems in this collection arrive especially urgently?   

CO: I write every day. There always seems to be an urgency in my art making. Time, that fleeting entity. Being consumed by the project and wanting it to be realized. I also urgently cast away a lot. Perhaps the Pandemic Road Trips pieces were written most in the moment, as it happens, in an attempt to capture the details of passing places. As I’ve written since I was four years old, I’ve learned to trust the sound of words in my blood and if a line comes into my head to write it down as soon as possible and then follow where it goes.

EC: Was there a specific incident or experience or series of events that inspired this work? What was the development process for the inspiration to become this newest collection?

CO: The experience that created Moving to Delilah was the life-altering one of moving provinces and purchasing my 1905 house. Then, of course, all the invariable happenings of so-called ownership. I started writing about the actual road trip from New Westminster, BC to Edmonton, AB with my father and brother in one of my dad’s last moving jobs in his truck before his retirement, then progressed to pieces that delved into the residual grief left from my partner’s death here in 2010, and onwards to pipes and the roof, to archives, to growing a garden then traveling outward from the neighbourhood to deeper into the province with my new partner. Natural elaborations of time becoming an obsession to record everything I could about this unique and yet common trajectory.

EC: 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?

CO: I am always reading a host of books in a wide range of genres, but I remember getting fascinated throughout the writing of Delilah with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, along with Shawna Lemay’s Calm Things, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty, Anne Truitt’s Daybook, May Sarton’s journals of home. And accounts of people renovating old houses in challenging neighbourhoods, like Detroit Hustle by Amy Haimerl. Texts that are quietly intense about seeing deeply and homing in on the necessities and beauties of the everyday.

EC: 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?

CO: It’s interesting thinking of a book of poems having a first draft! Usually, it’s individual poems that undergo multiple drafts over the course of time or that never progress beyond a first or second draft but get tossed beyond the compost pile into oblivion. But of course, the manuscript evolves and usually, this takes years. Moving to Delilah was five years in composition from start to finish. I often find that I will write intensely at the start and then gradually slow down as the sections fill out and the vision coheres. Then once the book is accepted for publication, I return to it to edit it down more severely (I must have cut over 50 pages at this point) and also to add pieces that seem to be missing in terms of the timeline or subject matter. And then, one must accept that nothing is ever entirely perfect or totally complete, and let go.

EC: Are any aspects of the book that is autobiographical? How did you consciously deal with your intimate material (i.e., experiences – emotional and physical) in a way that avoids the dangers of straight autobiography?

CO: Moving to Delilah is almost entirely autobiographical in that it traces a personal tale of re-locating, establishing a home and garden and connecting to a wider community while processing the later cycles of grief. However, as I write in a range of forms and draw from research in texts and archives, I have hopefully transcended the narrow confines of the self and enabled other readers to identify with the emotional and psychological experiences in the book.

EC: Have you ever collaborated on a writing project with another writer or artist? Can you share that experience?

CO: Yes I love collaborating if the fit with the other writer or artist or musician (or even dancer!) feels right. My longest-term collaboration was with the poet and painter Joe Rosenblatt (1933-2019) on a book-length sequence of sonnets called DOG (2006-08), based on the photographs of Karen Moe featuring Cuban canines. We also collaborated on a series of letters between three of our imagined personas called Dark Fish & Other Infernos (2009). Although the interchange was occasionally competitive, it was mostly fun as we tossed sextets and octets or later, repartee from the deep, back and forth via email or in person. And it’s a wonderful way to let go of one’s creative ego and explore ways to make beyond the self.

EC: Can you name a source of inspiration before the age of 12 that impacted your writing in some way?

CO: I have been an avid reader and writer since I was four years old, often to be seen surrounded by stacks of books or not to be seen, as I was enclosed in my room with my favourite texts such as the Illustrated Poems anthology, the Anne of Green Gables series, The Golden Book of Science, or Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth. But I would have to say that hearing Dennis Lee (Alligator Pie) and Gordon Korman (Bugs Potter) perform from their books, along with meeting Jean Little (From Anna) before the age of 12, inspired me with the knowledge that writers are real people and that writing is a necessary and beautiful act that has a reverberating impact in the world.

EC: What does the craft of writing mean to you?

CO: This is the big question! It means my whole life. The craft of writing, publishing and performing is what I live for. Shaping sounds and words and lines into poems and other genres so they can truly inhabit meaning, emotion, purpose, and connection is such a vital practice. The craft means no bullshit, buckle down, stop whining, hold on, don’t stop. You owe it to the song, the tale, the play to be present, to keep learning, to edit hard. Writing, in the end, crafts you.

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