So, I’ll hop along the blog
hop long after I’ve been
tagged by Kathleen Wall!
My post may not be
long, but it will not stop
hopping along the blog.
And to tag two more
would be Ariel Gordon
at the Jane Day Reader
and Pam Bustin. Hop
on the blog hop and tag twice!

What am I working on?

Everything and nothing. I’m working on doing a few readings from my recent book (this week I’m Alberta Bound), writing for my day job (advertising, workshop blurbs) and the occasional poem. Mostly I’m editing a manuscript that incorporates powerful women and ekphrastic poetry. And hair and art. It’s a mixed metaphor of where I’ve been, what I’ve done, combined with where I’m going and how to get there. I’m attracted to what haunts me and I write about it to make sense of why.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

It doesn’t.

And it does.

I’m me and write like me, and not like anyone else (I believe that our personalities shine through in all our creative endeavours). My imagination sometimes gets carried away with metaphor and simile. I sometimes make incomprehensible leaps that cause the people who read these leaps to look at me strangely. I like to play with language, and with themes of things that obsess me. I never want to write the same poem twice. I want each poem to stand alone, and I want each book to be different. My work comes as much from who I am, as from all those around me.

Why do I write what I do?

Well. Good question. I always wanted to be a great novelist. I wrote nothing but fiction and short stories when I was a teenager, often incorporating classmates into my stories, but somewhere in that time frame I also wrote some really abstract (yet interesting to me) poems that managed to wind up on the Youth page of the Western Producer under the pen name of The Mad Dr. B.

Mad indeed.

And almost a decade later, I took a class by Dave Margoshes at the U of R extension alongside Bernadette Wagner and June Mitchell, and somehow I still didn’t want to write poetry. Then a few years later, I decided to finish a degree it seemed I never started, working my way through school, and kids, and housework, and all the rest of the details.

And somehow in all that work, I began writing poetry. First came small poems, with short lines, then I worked my way to longer poems. The poems moved out of my head and onto the page with ease, often building within me while I was working, or trying to sleep. I finished writing one book only to start another, and then another. Right now I have two manuscripts on the go, and I’ve still not written my great novel.

What’s my creative process?

I don’t believe I really have one, but maybe not having one is like having one.

I think a lot, not always well, and not always in the direction I should be thinking. I read a lot. I write down what/how others write/say that I like and play with it. I take it apart and I put it together.

I’m drawn to brightly coloured objects and things that shine.

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.”

I’m attracted
to words and puzzles

cracking the alphabet up
and putting it

back together
again and again.