Your poems often take elements of farming and rural life as their subject. In a moment when the politics of identity seems to dominate poetry, what does poetry based in the rural and the pastoral (though in your case, non-idyllically) bring to the table?

I’ve been rereading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, and she quotes Keats saying “a poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence, because he has no identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other body …” Maybe that’s an archaic idea. And of course, farming and rural life is an identity too, albeit a somewhat marginalized one. Such a small percentage of our population lives in the country these days, and a tiny (ever decreasing) percentage actually farms. But everyone, no matter how urban, has food production somewhere back in their DNA.

I think it’s vitally important that poetry make space and give prominence to the diverse voices in our country that have rarely been heard. I hope there’s room also for the voices of farming and rural life. Working on and with the land, we are uniquely positioned to observe what’s going on with our climate and the natural world. More than that, every day we wrestle—or maybe negotiate is a better term—with the changing weather, the new species of weeds and parasites that warmer temperatures and global trade (among other factors) have brought into our reality. Many people today have a powerful commitment to the environment and the natural world, and that’s a wonderful thing. But working out there, trying to earn a living from the land is a whole different matter.

This fall has been the wettest we’ve seen in more than a quarter century on this land. After a fairly dry summer, in October we were literally splashing through our pastures. I always assumed it would be old age that spelled an end to this farming career, but I’ve started to wonder whether climate crisis will get there first. The change we humans have brought to the land and climate is one of the themes my poetry tries to tackle. We need not just to recognize and limit those changes but also to capture what these farm communities were like in the past and are like today. They don’t get much attention. They may not be here forever.

If there were a central theme or organizing principle to this collection, what would you say it would be? Did that theme rise out of the work as it developed, or was it evident early on and explicitly shape the collection?

The poems in this collection are written over several years—honestly, a decade or more. It’s taken me that long to assemble 50 poems! So there was certainly no theme when I started. The poems just arose out of whatever was happening on the farm or in my community or my head. It wasn’t until two years ago that I started to think I had a critical mass. I participated in a virtual version of the Sage Hill Poetry Workshop, and my focus was putting the manuscript into some sort of order. The seasons seemed kind of obvious but many of the poems didn’t want to be corralled into those categories. In the end, with the help of workshop instructor Sandra Ridley, I decided on a structure that starts with a wide lens on the region and community and gradually comes closer and closer to home.

The other thread throughout the book is the local history I was able to tap into. Starting as early as the 1920s, I think, Womens’ Institutes across the country took on the task of writing local histories of their communities and townships. In my township the W.I. put together its first history book to cover the period 1880 to 1960. Later, two additional volumes brought the history up to the 1990s. These books are a treasure for anyone interested in local history. They detail the background of every family and are full of anecdotes and stories about what life was like for people in this area. Here’s my new favourite I just discovered recently: “In 1996 Mr. and Mrs. F. had settled where their grandson Douglas now lives. They had a small shack with a sloping roof. During the winter Mr. F. went to a lumber camp to earn money, and Mrs. F. and her small children were left alone at home. She found it very lonesome there and when the dog developed a fondness for getting up on the sloping roof and howling, it didn’t help any.” I love the understatement there. Haven’t written a poem about that dog yet, but maybe I should.

Are there writers or collections whose style helped you come to find your way to your own style? How important is the direct or indirect company of other writers to your work?

I read a lot of poetry—much for pure pleasure, but there are also a few poets I return to regularly because they inspire or maybe even goad me to write: Philip Levine for his storytelling; Lorna Crozier for imagery, surprise and building silence into verse; Julie Bruck for humour and her delight in those small human moments. I don’t suggest for a second that my poetry approaches theirs, but we all need models. And the other major influence on my style, I suppose, is journalism. I went to school for journalism and worked a bunch of years as a reporter. And I used to feel that training was in conflict with poetry, but I’ve come to realize that maybe those skills and the ethic of reporting adds something to my poetry—I’m not quite sure what. I hope my writing keeps company with other poets but also walks along with a wide range of other writing and styles.