how art rises up & begins

(Jenna Butler, from Spindle)

Kait McLuhan, the editor here at Snowapple Press, recently conducted an interview with poet Jenna Butler, whose three short collections will be appearing with Snowapple in late 2011 and early 2012. Read on to find out more about this intriguing poet, teacher, and organic farmer from Canada’s north!

KM: Spindle, Love Letters, and Songs for a Broken Season will be your sixth, seventh, and eighth short collections of poetry, in addition to two trade collections. Beyond writing, though, you also teach at Grant MacEwan University full-time, and run a publishing company and an organic farm. My question to you is…how?

JB: I guess it comes down to two things: love and need. I feel so lucky in that I love what I do, whether that means being in front of a class of students, scribbling at my writing desk, or chopping the winter’s wood supply at the farm. Everything I do informs something else. As a writer, I learned very early on that I have to balance the “head work” of creating and teaching with something done with my hands, so the farm is a real boon. And although I’m a terrible introvert, I do love dialoguing with my students; at the same time that teaching takes energy from me, it gives me so much joy, and that is something I can circle back to my writing. I make time, even if it’s a line here or there in between marking a set of essays or planting the year’s potatoes. I have to address that need to put pen to paper. I find I can’t breathe otherwise.

KM: The first collection in the trilogy Snowapple will be publishing, Spindle, takes a hard look at creating beauty out of heartbreak. Although this is a slim little book, the poems are remarkably polished in regard to an event that was obviously very emotionally difficult. Do you generally take your time processing such events into poems?

JB: Yes. The event behind Spindle, in particular, took a great deal of ducking and dodging before I found myself able to write about it head-on. It’s not that I was afraid of confronting the emotions so much as I was trying to understand them. I came at the collection from a few different angles before I settled on the anti-ghazal form that I love so well…but here, it’s a little different…a little unhinged, detaching from the left margin more. Playing with the page, with the rawness of emotion.

KM: I wanted to remark on that, the margin play in these poems. Although I’m familiar as an editor with the Persian ghazal, I did have to do some reading up about the anti-ghazal (created by another Canadian, poet Phyllis Webb). Can you speak a bit more about the further de-structuring you’re doing of the anti-ghazal form in these poems?

JB: It’s just as you say: it’s about margin play. The relationship driving the poems was one of those that takes your life and systematically unhinges it from everything you thought you knew or thought you were. This can be both generative and terrifying. Trust is given, and so there’s the possibility of shattering. At its root, those relationships teach you about the necessity of somehow remaining anchored, even though lightly, to what you know when your life swings in the wind. I wrote the poems to reflect that drift within the margin shift in each couplet of lines.

KM: Can you speak a bit about the other two collections of yours we will be releasing, Love Letters and Songs for a Broken Season?

JB: Love Letters is a short book of poems to the north country where I’ve spent most of my life. I travel a great deal for my writing and lecturing, but wherever I am, I feel the same deep need to locate myself in the landscape, to find some sort of understanding of its stories. The poems in this book are my attempt to form those connections with various small towns and cities in western Canada.

Songs for a Broken Season is a collection of word-line acrostics based on the poems of John Newlove. I’ve always been a huge fan of Newlove’s work, and I found myself seeking ways in which to engage with his subject matter, specifically the Canadian landscape, interpersonal dynamics, aging, change, and death. The word-line acrostic form allows me a modicum of my own creativity within the bounds of using Newlove’s own words as line starters.

KM: Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Robert Service…Canadian poetry is underpinned by writers who “went back to the land” in one way or another, either leaving the city permanently or seasonally for a quieter life somewhere rural. You’ve talked about this a bit in previous questions, but how does your farm figure into your writing life?

JB: Aside from balancing my writing and teaching work, I just love being outdoors. My husband and I decided early on that growing and preserving our own food and living an off-grid lifestyle was important to us, and we’ve been building toward that for the past five years. The farm cabin is somewhere I can go and write on weekends during the school year, but in the summers, it’s our full-time home while we’re tending the garden. It’s a beautiful place to relax and get away from the city…and the solitude is appreciated by our friends in the city, too, as there’s usually a steady stream of folk coming by for visits! I like that sense of crafting a place to retreat to; I need to know that it’s there for my creative life when my teaching life gets too crazy. And my work is so often centered in my relationship with the land, with our farm. Our garden is only two hand-cleared acres amongst 160 acres of northern woods, so there’s a lovely feeling of having just enough to live on, to grow and gather food, and then the rest of the land as a wild space.

KM: You’ve described yourself to me once before as having a hunger for learning. You have your BA and BEd from the University of Alberta and your MA and PhD from the University of East Anglia in the UK; what’s next for you, Jenna?

JB: My quiet dream is to enrol in a Master Herbalist program in the coming year. A little different from an English degree, I know! But I’ve always been fascinated by herbal medicine, and the farm affords me all sorts of opportunities to grow and create remedies. I’d like to extend what I’ve already learned over the years from friends and family. More than that, I feel that I teach best when I’m also learning something myself. It keeps me engaged, and it keeps me aware of (and sympathetic to) the time challenges my students face.

KM: What’s in the works for you now in terms of new books?

JB: There are two poetry collections that I’ve been working on for a while now. I’ve nearly finished a manuscript of anagram poems about Lewis Carroll (it’s taken me five years!) and I’ve been working on a new collection about the Victorian painter Richard Dadd, who spent much of his artistic career in Bedlam Psychiatric Hospital. I’m also tentatively trying my hand at fiction and non-fiction; a novel (creative non-fiction) is in edits, and a book of essays about the farm is slowly taking shape. A publisher has asked to see it when it’s finished, but it’s a very different kind of writing for me, so I’m going slowly and just letting it take the time it needs.

New releases from Snowapple in 2011/2012 include our latest acquisitions, a trilogy of short collections by Canadian poet Jenna Butler.

Sparse and lovely, these small chapbooks (Spindle, Songs For a Broken Season, and Love Letters) will be appearing through the fall and winter of 2011/12. All three play beautifully off each other, offering up the decisive slivering of heartache with a finely attuned ear. They find their center, as Butler herself says, “in the heart’s propensity to survive in spite of us, to come through absolute desolation and somehow arrive singing.”

Butler has her doctorate from the University of East Anglia (UK) and teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada. She is the author of five previous short collections of poetry and two trade books. You can find her online at www.jennabutler.com.