… a very personal record of our travels as we set out to discover Madrid and Andalusia, and to rediscover ourselves …
To be a creative artist of any kind means that you are almost always on output. You are digging deeply and finding ways to create art from what you are seeing and thinking. But frankly, it can be exhausting. Every well runs dry.
What bewilders me is that with social media, people seem to be on output all of the time. How do they do it? Where are the moments of reflection and contemplation that are the necessary base for creativity? How can you find strength and wisdom if you never take the opportunity to listen and watch the world?
The last few years have been artistically intense for me. I’ve had three published books in three years. There are two more on the way, and another in process. Frankly, I needed to take a step back. To breathe deeply and slowly, with no agenda to produce or create anything. And what better way to do that than on the road, where the preoccupations are train schedules and finding a good roadside café?
This blog began in 2011 as a record of our year on the road. That year, and the writing I did then, changed my life. But I don’t write regular blogs –– not every day is a day of adventure or reflection! And of course since 2011, there have been a lot of other ways to record things and tell people in fast and furious posts all about your exciting life. I’ve done my fair share of that. But with this trip, I deliberately held the journey close. I needed to take the time to be “in” the experience, rather than to write or post about it.
However, as the trip wound down and the glamour of sunny days in Spain became crystalline memories, I found that I want to wrap some words around the adventure. I wanted to put some thoughts out there for other travellers who might want to explore these roads. Or for any armchair travellers, who might be interested in the reflections of two aging writers navigating new pathways.
What follows over the next few blog entries is a very personal record of our travels, Tim’s and mine, as we set out to discover Madrid and Andalusia, and to rediscover ourselves. Tim and I off the treadmill and on the road.
In fact, I actively avoided writing poetry. There are SO MANY bad poems in the world. And I had to say, so many people who write bad poetry. And yet, even after writing a novel in verse and a book of poetry about the planets, I would be very hesitant to call myself a poet.
But poetry has always been a huge part of my life. I studied calligraphy when I was young, eventually becoming a full-time calligraphic artist. I spent countless hours lettering beautiful poems. As an actor, my voice training included work with vibrant poems of all genres, spoken, memorized and incorporated into performances.
But compose a poem? Never.
When I did my first residency for my MFA in writing for children and youth (VCFA), we were assigned Steven Fry’s book The Ode Less Travelled. This deliciously funny, wicked, irreverent book on writing and reading poetry forced me to realize that my years of reading, lettering and speaking poetry had left a mark. Words were deep in my cells –– the look of them, the sound of them, the rhythm, skip and beath of them, the feel of them in my mouth, lips and chest.
Words are the building blocks for any writer. But as a writer for young people, I needed to embrace my role as a writer who constructed meaning from little bits of sound. Children learn language through playing with words, and I needed to rediscover a sense of play. I needed to get over myself.
Still, I am more comfortable with boundaries. I need discipline around the edges, not a free for all wallowing in self-centred bliss. As I read more picture books, I discovered the American poet Joyce Sidman. Sidman writes nature books, combining information with the language of poetry. Her book Caldicott winning book Dark Emperor and other Poems of the Night is a masterful combination of sound that explores the world of night creatures. This is fabulous, I thought. I can do that!
I’m a regular listener to the CBC show Quirks and Quarks. Every week, there is something new –– some beetle, some volcano, some newly discovered moon of Jupiter, some surprising discovery that connects us to the universe around us. I began trolling through Quirks and Quarks for interesting subjects, doing further research. I wrote poems about the Wandering Glider, lowly Mites, and the newly discovered Dracoraptor and Therapoda dinosaurs. But it was when I discovered new findings from Pluto that I went crazy.
Poor little Pluto, bouncing between classifications as a Planet and a Dwarf Planet, little Pluto has a red, heart-shaped plateau on it that ebbs and flows as though it was a beating heart! It has skies that are bright blue! Who couldn’t fall in love with that?
But how to actually structure a poem? At that point, I was studying different poetry forms and had just discovered the Pantoum and voila! Alliteration! A Pantoum for Pluto! It was a marriage made in poetry heaven.
But one poem does not a collection make. And one poem does not make a poet.
I started discussing the idea of a book of poems about new discoveries in our solar system with Katie Scott at Kids Can Press. Because of my background in poetry, we came up with the idea of choosing a different poetic form for each planet. The characteristics of each planet would influence the choice of poetic form. Young people would learn about the planets AND learn about poetry. Brilliant, I thought. I get to learn more about poetry while I am learning about the planets! Bring it on!
Had I had ANY idea of how hard this was, I would have run away screaming. I am not a scientist nor am I a poet. What on earth was I thinking?
Eight years later, A Planet is a Poem is coming out from Kids Can Press. I am thrilled, and of course terrified. I’m confident in my facts (if you can’t trust NASA, who can you trust?), but aware that to aspire to good poetry is to aspire to divinity. You can see it, you can love it, but you can never achieve it. Still, it is a book I am proud of because if combines the logic of poetic forms with the wonders of the solar system. The discipline of art is married to the mystery of science.
I would still be hesitant to call myself a poet. I love the process, the puzzle, and the agony of working with words. But poetry is sacred. It is the purest form in which we can convey ideas, and I haven’t yet achieved that effervescence, that translucence that I aspire to. But I am no longer afraid to try. Because I will always love the bounce, thrum, wobble, and slither of language. It’s what we have that connects us to our world.
I’m posting an interview that I recently did for The Canadian Childrens Book Centre.
It’s a busy time! I am thrilled to be launching a new book for young people A Planet is a Poem, which you’ll hear more about in the coming days. In the meantime, happy reading…
You are a writer, calligrapher, and theatre artist, three creative pursuits which are built on the foundation of words. What attracts you to words? How do words inspire, motivate, challenge and/or change you as a writer?
I come from a word-obsessed family. My grandmother was a writer, editor, and bookstore owner. My mother was a book designer. My uncle was a journalist. I married a writer. Perhaps it is not a big surprise that words are the foundational tool in my life!
My mother enrolled me in a calligraphy course when I was a teenager. I went on to do extensive studies of the development of letterforms. For me, calligraphy was a gateway into cultural history and the whole concept of written language. It was also fundamental in giving me a tactile relationship to words. When you calligraph, you work very slowly. You focus on creating shapes and manipulating space on the page. On a good day, it is very meditative. You involve your breath and connect to the movement of your hand on the page. You go down into the bones of a word, and how one letter connects to another. It’s an intimate relationship between gesture and meaning.
This may be why I write first drafts by hand. I love feeling the graphic line and how it dances across a piece of paper. It stimulates a particular part of my brain and opens me up to things that are not available to me through typing on a keyboard. My manuscripts would be illegible to anyone else –– they are filled with the movement of my hand and brain, working together.
However, the challenge for me is not to overwork words in the editing process. How do I keep the sense of freedom and lightness of the word dance on a page, when I want to work on word choice? How do you make something look effortless when it takes a huge amount of effort and skill? But that, I think, is the plight of anyone working in the arts. You must make it feel fresh and new, yet it must be crafted to the best of your ability. That’s where practice and rehearsal become essential. It’s not something you can achieve in a first draft.
Photo courtesy of The Ottawa Children’s Theatre
The theatre world is a place you know well. You served as executive director of Ottawa School of Speech & Drama as well as founded Ottawa Children’s Theatre and served as its artistic director. Your writing and theatre worlds united when you and your husband co-wrote Rosie Backstage. How else has your work as a theatre artist influenced or informed your writing for young people?
I can’t imagine being a writer without being a theatre artist. Words are a metaphor for communication, but not the sine qua non of communication. Movement, gesture, tone, inflection, silence –– we use all of these to communicate thoughts and feelings. In theatre. all of these tools are at your disposal. Theatre gives you the ability to create nuances that are harder to communicate with words alone. It uses movement and sound. It uses timing. It is so much more than a series of dialogue lines. So much more than a set. When you are creating for the stage, you need to think about what happens between the words and to the people as they move in space.
As a writer, I try to explore how to create this complexity on the page. I read everything out loud, many times. I listen for the beats, the pauses. I listen for the movements and gestures. I listen for what the character isn’t saying. I place each character in the scene, being aware of where they are and what they are doing when someone else has the focus of the scene.
I also use a lot of theatre exercises in my writing. For example, there’s a theatre game called “What’s Beyond,” where you work on coming into a space focused on what you have just left. You don’t try to tell a story, you don’t try to do anything. You just cross the space with a history. When I am writing, I think a lot about where my character has been before they come into the space, into the scene. It’s different from a backstory. It’s more immediate. A character must come on with their scene already in motion. They aren’t coming on from a vacuum. What they bring with them is going to affect their behaviour in a myriad of small ways that are never discussed.
Perhaps even more fundamentally, however, is how my vocal training has affected the way I work with words and my word choices. Writing is a stand-in for spoken words, so I need to always go back to the vocal source. Learning about breath, resonance, and articulation has given me a very deep physical relationship to words. There is some brain science that suggests that as we read, our mind and body recreate the physical sensation of making the words we are reading. I want people to not only hear the words on the page, but to feel them and recognize them in their own body.
On a practical level, I have taught theatre to young people for many, many years and continue to work in that field. Working with youth keeps me honest. They engage me in their concerns and in what matters to them. It is far too easy to get ghettoized in your own age group. Working inter-generationally is vital to me.
In These Are Not the Words, Missy and her father write poems for each other – poems that gradually become an exchange of apologies as her father’s alcohol and drug addiction begins to overtake their lives. How can we use poetry to communicate with others and to heal ourselves?
I think that writing can be a way of talking to yourself. Ultimately, you are having a conversation with your mind and your heart. But I think you need to trick yourself into going more deeply.
When you have a conversation with a good friend, you usually stay on a particular level for a long time. But after a while, if you are close and trust your friend, it morphs into something deeper. Those are the special times where you get closer and listen harder and respond more honestly. You have to give yourself time to go through the superficial things before you can get to the heart of the matter. Writing poetry can do this. You write too much and then you cut out all of the fluff. You see what words are essential. That’s when you discover what it is you are really trying to communicate.
I also think that poetry, like theatre or calligraphy, is a kind of game. It’s got some great rules that give us a context for deep exploration. You play with sound and rhythm, and in that playing, you can trick your mind into finding new meanings.
Writing is about asking questions –– of yourself, of your imagined reader. Questions can form the base for a dialogue. It’s the best way to talk to yourself. And when you talk to yourself, you can heal.
*Science and poetry may seem like strange bedfellows but they share commonalities such as formulas and patterns. What was your inspiration to write A Planet is A Poem, a collection of poems about the solar system?
A Planet is a Poem came about through a series of coincidences. When I was doing my MFA in Writing for Children, I started a serious study of poetic forms. I hadn’t done that before. My previous schooling was, at best, pretty spotty. I began working my way through the delightful The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry, and challenging myself to try out as many different forms as I could. As we know, books for younger children rely on sound and word play, so I wanted to drill down and understand things that I had known about but had never tried my hand at. I had avoided writing poetry all of my life. I reasoned that there are so many bad poems out there, the world didn’t need mine as well. But this was a technical challenge I was setting myself, and I wasn’t thinking of publishing anything at that point.
At the same time, I was introduced to the American poet Joyce Sidman. Sidman writes non-fiction poetry books for young people. I love her work and it opened up a whole world for me. My first books had been non-fiction books for young people and truth be told, I am much more comfortable writing non-fiction than I am writing fiction. I became open to the idea that poetry could be a vehicle for young people to learn about nature. I thought that maybe I could write non-fiction poetry and it wouldn’t be as embarrassing as bad personal poetry.
The other influence was the CBC radio program Quirks and Quarks. I love that show and in one particular episode (September 11, 2015), they talked about the New Horizons space probe. It had just started sending images of Pluto back to earth and everyone was talking about these amazing things we were learning. On Pluto, the skies are blue! There are volcanos of slow-moving nitrogen mud! There’s a red, heart-shaped plateau that moves like a heartbeat! Who wouldn’t want to write a poem about that? I wrote A Pantoum for Pluto so that I could explore Pluto but also try that poetic form. Ultimately, we didn’t use that particular poem in the book, but the process was set in motion. Before I knew it, I was deep into researching (always my happy place), and the puzzle of writing non-fiction poetry.
*A Planet is a Poem offers readers multiple access points for interaction.There are its 14 poems which can be enjoyed on their own. Plus, there is accompanying factual information about each poem’s subject matter. And last but not least, there is information on the forms in which the poems are written. How did you decide to present the book in this format? And why was it important to you to create the book this way?
I had quite a few coffee dates with Katie Scott at Kids Can Press, where I tried to pitch her on the idea of non-fiction poetry about planets and/or insects (another area I was obsessing about because of Quirks and Quarks). But they already had a book coming out the next year on space, and one on bugs. The question was what might make mine unique.
I don’t know exactly how the idea of a cross-curricular book came about. I was pretty passionate about poetic forms, and somehow the brainstorming led us to a book that could give the science and the poetry equal weight. Both Katie and my editor Kathleen Keenan got excited about doing a book that could show kids both the magic of language and of the solar system.
Once we had the basic idea, I researched the solar system. I’m not a scientist, but I love astronomy and still remember being in the Hayden Planetarium in New York when I was a child. I researched each planet as though it was a character in a novel. I worked on matching those characteristics with a particular poetic form. For example, Mercury, which is the smallest planet, is incredibly fast. It travels around the sun more quickly than any of the others. So, I paired it with a very fast rhyming and rhythm scheme inspired by Dr. Suess, with only two beats to the bar.
Mercury’s tiny ––
Of planets, the smallest.
But named for a god
Who was known as the fastest.
I researched because I loved it. But as with my experiences in writing historical fiction, it became impossible to squash all of exciting things I was learning into each poem. So, we came up with the idea of sidebars to give more of the scientific information.
The more I worked on the book, the more I got excited about the poetic forms I was using. We came up with the idea of sidebars for the poetry too, just as there were sidebars for the science. It was designer Marie Bartholomew who had the tough job of pulling all of that together with the great illustrations by Oliver Averill.
*What advice would you impart to young people and the young at heart who would like to pursue careers as writers?
Read. Read everything. Listen to words, make them your friends and play with them. Sing them! Foster your sense of curiosity. Let your curiosity take you to new places. Always, always challenge yourself to try new things. Care passionately and let your writing follow your passion. Make it matter.
Stepping off the Treadmill 