One of the things this collection offers is a multifaceted look at a place, examining the way different people and different generations occupy the same ground. Was that intentional or was it simply what emerged?

Both, really. The book began as two different responses to place. When I first moved to Squamish in 2013, it was undergoing a transformation from a logging town to a tourist destination. Marine life was just making a comeback after a century of mining pollution. Dolphins and orcas were finally being spotted again. At the time, a proposal for a liquid natural gas shipping facility was on the table. The town was experiencing a population influx from nearby Vancouver and there was conflict between ‘old’ and ‘new’ residents. When I wasn’t working at an environmental education centre, I recorded my observations of these interactions and my own responses to them in a series of poems.

Around the same time, I started researching the history of nearby Britannia Mines, at one time the largest copper mine in the world. My great-grandfather had worked the tunnels there a century earlier while my grandmother attended school. As I learned more about their world and the tumultuous events they lived through (fire, floods, cave-ins) poems started to emerge in their voices.

After a couple years of working on these separate projects, it occurred to me that they might be in conversation with each other. Both historical and present-day communities were tight-knit and depended on each other and the land for a living. Both experienced natural disasters, economic downturns, and faced hard questions about the future. Taking my inspiration from the Squamish River, I braided the two manuscripts together. From there, I sequenced the poems to highlight parallels and to create that multifaceted perspective of place.

The tensions between development and preservation come up quite a bit in this book, as they frequently do in our daily lives. What role do you think poetry has to play in helping communities reconcile these tensions?

First off, I think poetry can help us to reconcile those tensions within ourselves. Poetry asks hard questions; it holds us accountable. As I write this, I sit on a wooden chair, reading these questions on a cell phone full of precious metals like gold, silver and copper. My shelves of books, all printed on paper pulped from coniferous forests. And while I recycle and reuse my bread bags, I still drive the car to go hiking every weekend. Poetry holds space for complexity. My great-grandfather was a miner, my grandfather a logger; I come from a lineage of people who have made their living from resource extraction. I wouldn’t think of them as likely allies in preservation, yet we share a connection to the woods.

In the poem “My Squamish Is Not Your Squamish,” I juxtapose opposing viewpoints of a logger’s wife, an old-timer, a cook, and a town councillor and let their voices talk to each other. At a community forum, with people shouting over one another, it can be hard to listen to each other, to see points of connection. But because reading is a solitary endeavour, ideas presented in poem form can be taken in slowly with space to digest them. Poetry allows us to see our commonalities, and for me, that is the starting place for moving forward together as a community.

Are there writers whose work helped you to find your own voice as a poet and to develop your form?

While working on this book, I was reading C.D. Wright’s The Poet, The Lion. The repeating titles in her collection provide a scaffolding for the larger structure. Reading her work—alongside Anne Carson’s Plainwater and John Steffler’s The Grey Islands—has taught me a lot about pacing and narrative arc in long poems. I’m drawn to book-length works for their scope—each poem exists on its own but also builds on what comes before. Long poems fit together like a puzzle. Literally. When I sequence a book, I tape the individual pieces up on a large wall and move them around to create resonance and build tension until the flow feels right.

Susan Sontag writes, “You have no choice but to work with yourself as a lens through which to see the world.” As my writing is often informed by life, I’m inspired by writers who can transform their experience into something larger than themselves, who invite the reader in.

Early influences include Bronwen Wallace, Jane Kenyon, Dionne Brand and Lucia Perillo.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Fred Wah, who twenty years ago at Sage Hill said, to be noticed, you have to write differently. And I think that’s where I became interested in playing with form within the context of narrative/lyric poetry. Whether those are neighbourhood maps, concrete poems, or multiple columns, form can add another layer to a poem when it’s done intentionally.