You describe the process of “inverted redacting” in creating Anthesis from your earlier novel. How did the constraint of established words and phrases impact your work?

One of the challenges I experienced was disrupting the narrative and temporal flow of the words in a way that would make space for me to engage in retrieving the words that still felt vital or had sap running in them and that were, in their way, apart from or glittering in the sentences/prose they were embedded in. Disrupting the narrative convention was no small thing for me. I could feel the politic of it. What breaking free from it implied. This retrieval gradually felt more organic like a rescue or, ultimately, like an act of liberation of the girl I was and who was still persisting and as well as liberation from a narrative form that had wooded over and that was no longer serving her/me.

I had to reckon with the pronoun she/her used in the novel and warmed to how she soon became an entity I could reflect on for how expansive she became; for how she houses so many of us; for how she is furred differently than the first person pronoun which, to me, might have felt more like survival, which is an entirely different motor than what I wanted. This was an act of retrieval and honouring. In this way, the she became a community that might have begun with me as girl but soon expanded, which gave me courage.

What do you hope that readers who have not read your novel will meet with this text’s vulnerability and wildness?

What surprises me still about this text is how it creates its own way of being much like how water finds its way to where it needs to go. I’m always beguiled by words and, in this case, how the words that lasted create their own fluency that feels apart from any narrative I’ve encountered. This way of telling/being feels singular and autonomous/independent from the novel where those words were waiting. Wild. In this way, I think the poem can be read without any familiarity with its text of origin for how the process has made its own logic and by how the words startle themselves into collaborating a way forward. This emergent practice feels important.

As I said, I’m still surprised by how dynamic this process was and what it manifested. What I hope readers who have not read the novel encounter is the potential this way of being instigates, how updating how we tell stories changes something fundamental in our understanding of ourselves and how we relate to others, how it refreshes and renews the archive. How this way of thinking/being can become a practice that acknowledges how malleable time is in some ways and how we are constantly becoming and are therefore capable of great change. I also hope readers consider how much power the stories we tell of ourselves have and how changing that telling can be transformational. The words we choose to use are important, vital. And how vulnerability is crucial to that transformative shift for how we are choosing to risk not knowing in the pursuit of growth and deepening our understanding of ourselves and of each other. This also feels important for this time we find ourselves on the planet when a renewal, a refresh of our ways of being feels so imminent and so necessary.

In these poems, aspects of the landscape often present as characters, beings. How do they support or intrude on the characters and events in this text?

Emily Dickinson said there are no pauses in the natural world and I know growing up I relied on that reliability, the physical tree after tree after tree for some kind of sustenance I can’t quite name but recognize that it still feels important. That natural landscape, at times, felt more like home than my house did. There was a sense of not outright welcome but a welcoming, a space for me. That company is something I continue to honour and I found, in extracting the girl from the narrative, what came along with her were those trees, the landscape that had kept her company. Kept me company in that realigning way. And as it still does.