As someone who is also a storyteller working in the oral tradition, do you find that your approach alters when you shift gears and write a poem? How do storytelling and writing complement or contrast with each other?

My approaches are almost the opposite of each other. When I create a story I prefer to walk around in a space (outside or inside) and think about the events or messages that I want to convey and how to create a narrative to carry those. I don’t necessarily sit down and type the story out before I share it with audiences. When I write poetry, I sit down in a quiet place and write specific words in order to ‘paint’ a feeling, thought, or moment. I’m aware that my audience will mostly engage with that art, literary poetry, without me as the reader and so I carve with words as carefully as I can, using line breaks to help bring clarity. It might take a few years to edit some poetry by coming back to it and re-reading it, searching for each nuance of each word or line to make sure that’s what I meant. With my oral stories, I edit the next time that I share the story with another live audience. I might remember that last time I told it a certain plot or way I described a character needed better wording and so I try a different way with the new audience.

I love that I have different mediums by which to share my thoughts. Sometimes what I want to share with people is best carried by an oral story, where I can change the tone of my voice or sing to the people to create an atmosphere of sensation. On the other hand, most of my poetry comes from what I want to share that is a briefer but more complex thought. I enjoy taking my time to find the right words to create a path that the reader will follow in their own time, in their own kind of silence or atmosphere, where they get to imagine and connect to it in various ways.

Your work is rooted in place, in your community’s multigenerational relationship with the land. How does your relationship to place inform your poetry?

Much of my personal grounding is from relating to nature, watching, interacting, and learning from it. Over time my relationship with nature and place has developed through the lens of being Mi’kmaw and it has shaped my view of every forest stand, every stream, and every coast. I wonder about our ancestors, about our language, and about our future as Mi’kmaq. I actually spent the first 14 years of my childhood moving across the country with my family and I saw first hand how varied the landscapes and cultures are, how place helps shape people.

My poetry is inspired by mothering, my community around me, the trails through the forest that I walk often, the river that I watch over the course of seasons and my dreams of past and future here. I have been writing about what I perceive and it’s very much about this place around me. I’m not sure how to separate my own sense of being human from place and I don’t separate my work as a poet from my everyday life, at least not for these two first collections.

Many of your poems are based in your personal history and experiences, but also in your community’s history and experiences as Indigenous people injured by Canada’s settlement. What do you believe poetry can contribute to the work of healing and reconciliation?

There’s an intimate emotional power in poetry that is difficult to get across in public workshops or school textbooks. It can be acute, pointing to a certain idea, moment, painful or celebratory, that brings the reader immediately into the crux of the story and on each page a complete mirror or grappling of some element of our experience.

With these personal truths in poetry, I hope that non-Indigenous readers will be able to have a deeper, broader, or more contextual understanding and empathy that might be more difficult to articulate, but that run deeper into their awareness so that future conversations about policy, treaty, and indigenizing various sectors of Canadian life are widened, more thoughtful. For both Indigenous and non-Indigenous readers, I hope that cultural/historical poetry can bring healing by the way that we grieve together, laugh together, celebrate the beauty and strength of Indigenous peoples together. This way, Indigenous story is really heard and that’s the ‘Truth’ part in Truth and Reconciliation. For me, reading and writing poetry about our communities, nations, and cultural landscapes is very much about healing. I end up reconnecting to all of these by way of reading or writing. I find that the more we all share and end up in talking circles, the more we find ways forward together.