Catherine Graham: Congratulations on your Griffin International Poetry Prize nomination for your collection 40 Sonnets (Faber and Faber). As noted in the Judge’s Citation you write ‘with resonant clarity about anything’—a wave, the American photographer Francesca Woodman, the Norwegian jazz singer Radka Toneff, your dog, your children, the soul. The sonnet is your home in this collection, your playing field. You have published sonnets in previous collections. What is it about the form that compels you to keep writing them? Is form a requirement of poetry?
Don Paterson: “Compels” is maybe the right word, as I can see that my involvement with the damn thing might imply love, which would be an overstatement, or at least a bit misleading. Some days I’d be happy never to write another, but I guess you should try to cultivate a zen-like indifference to these matters. It’s quite simple, really: they just make certain poems not just easier to write but possible to write. They’re a way of me working through something I would otherwise find too difficult or uncomfortable or upsetting or contradictory to engage with. Speaking purely selfishly, I find increasingly that the poem feels more like a by-product of me just trying to … work out what the hell is going on here, exactly, a kind of means to an end. I mean I know that’s not true, but it doesn't seem a bad strategy to think of that way, to be more interested in what the poem is proposing than the poem itself, or something. I don’t see poetry as distinct from form any more than I do music, really; I’d say that all poetry has form. There are just different kinds of rules that different poetic temperaments find productive. Personally, I like things that offer enough resistance to stop me saying the thing I wanted to say, which was often pretty stupid, or something everyone else already knew.

CG: Did you find during the writing of this book that despite your excitement for a certain subject matter and your skill and expertise with the sonnet form, a poem demanded a different shape? Or was your intuition pretty much in alignment throughout so there was always a match between form and content? 
DP: I think I may have unconsciously avoided any poems that demanded a different shape, since I’d rather arbitrarily set myself the task of writing a book of 55 sonnets. I ran out around 47 and removed the crap ones and settled on 40, as the number connotes … arduous labour? That was my hope … There’s a long prose thing which a few folk have claimed isn’t a sonnet, but that’s kind of the point of it, and it explains itself, with any luck. So if there’s the appearance of alignment, it really came about through self-censorship as much as anything, although I wouldn’t say I felt any frustration beyond the usual frustration. I think I did have in mind Die Sonette an Orpheus, though, where Rilke also takes the opportunity to see how far he can stretch the sonnet form, without making it just an empty designation. 
 
CG: What sonnets led you to the interest in the form?
DP: I think it was more a matter of just slowly registering that many of the poets I was influenced by, or tried to be influenced by – Frost and Muldoon and Rilke and Shakespeare, etc.—had all used the sonnet to blow the reader’s mind in a particular way. There are a few that I still think of as exemplary models. No surprises–Sonnet 86, ‘Design,’ ‘Why Brownlee Left,’ ‘Archaic Torso’ and so on.
 
CG: “The Air” is a sonnet of questions. “Séance” plays with the erosion (or is it transformation?) of a word. “An Incarnation” is a one-sided phone call. “A Powercut” is structured by the word this. Did you set out with specific parameters in mind while writing each sonnet or did the shape and matter reveal itself to you during the writing? Can you tell us something about your process here?
DP: No, definitely the latter. My motto is—if you have a good idea for a poem, it isn’t. So if I have a structure in mind, or I know exactly what it is I want to say—these days I have the good sense to stop writing. My process is really just to commit to a process, and be vigilant against my ever thinking I’ve gotten good enough to turn it into an operation. It can take as long as it likes, change or not change as much as it likes, and I try to allow form and device and structure to just emerge. And when they have … generally I’ll tighten it and turn it into an organising rule. But I have to have the sense that the poem has proposed the rule, not me. Of course it is me, but with any luck it’s a part of me I’m not over-acquainted with. “No surprise in the writer,” and all that.

CG: During the Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings at Koerner Hall, you shared a story about being stuck in an elevator, an experience that let you to the poem “A Powercut.” Did the notion ‘there just might be a poem here’ arrive during that (horrible!) incident or afterwards? What are your thoughts on life infiltrating art? Is that important to you as a poet?
DP: Ha! It was in Yorkshire in a tiny guest house. World’s most embarrassing lift to get stuck in. Yeah—you know what poets are like. They barely experience reality. A poet looks at a friend as an inconvenience standing between them and a half-decent elegy. We’re a disgrace. I think I probably started writing the poem in my head before the lights came back on.
 
CG: With regards to the International Griffin Award, you’ve been a part of this experience as editor of two Griffin-nominated collections, Grain by John Glenday and Pilgrim’s Flower by Rachael Boast. How does it feel to be on the other side of the page so to speak?
DP: I’ve been doing it so long I don't think about it much any more, and these days I can get out of my wee editor’s green visor and into my snotty woollen author’s hat, the one covered in dirt from being thrown out the pram a lot, in about two seconds flat. As my own editor will tell you. But I love the shameless pride you get to take in seeing an author doing well. For a Scot, especially, it’s much better than that pride you might momentarily take in the success of your own books, which is of course a sin, and will often find its immediate punishment. No one believes me, but for us … someone paying you a compliment might as well be stabbing you in the chest.

CG: Last year, when I spoke with Griffin International Poetry Prize Winner, Michael Longley, he said at this point in your writing life you have “all the tools for producing forgery and it’s important not to.” What constitutes “forgery” for you?
DP: Professing to feel what you don’t. And deluding yourself you’re breaking new ground when you’re just digging up the old. As the Sufis say, when you finish the work, dismantle the workshop. Michael’s bang on. There are times when you have nothing to say, or at least nothing you haven't already said. I think you should take poetry seriously enough to not write it.

CG: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve been given that you use?
DP: Derek Mahon once told me that for poets, “reading is the same as writing.” Just because you’re not covering the page doesn't mean you’re not making careful preparation. There’s no hurry for this stuff, no deadline to meet, so you might as well get it right.

CG: What’s next for Don Paterson?
DP: Oh god—ask the horse. Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise—in terms of stuff, I’ve a crazy long unreadable treatise on poetics out next year, which I barely understand. Then a New and Selected aphorisms, and a book of versions of lots of different European poets, mainly on ideas of the soul, in which I have very little faith but tend to obsess over anyway. A new long poem, which will take an age. A couple of very short introductory books, I think. A play. And I’m playing music again after a 12 year lay-off, which is proving to be fun, for me at least, so I have a bunch of gigs coming up with a quartet. Kids, dogs, lecturing, editing, Netflix, y’know—anything but actually having to face myself in silence, ho ho … I mean—if one were to live until the age of 250, treating your  entire life as a displacement activity would be pretty unhealthy, but given where we are, it seems a reasonable use of the time.  I’ve learned a lot from working with Clive James over the years: Clive projects himself into the future through his books, and these days it keeps him going where folk who’d asked less of themselves would have dropped. “Always giving yourself something to think about” might not be the life, but it seems to me a life. 

 Catherine Graham is the author of Her Red Hair Rises with the Wings of Insects, a finalist for the Raymond Souster Poetry Award and the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award. She received an Excellence in Teaching Award at the University of Toronto where she teaches creative writing and was also the winner of the International Festival of Authors’ Poetry NOW competition in 2014.  Her sixth poetry collection will appear in 2017 as will her first novel, Quarry. Visit: www.catherinegraham.com

Chris Evans: You’ve said before that humour is an aspect of the collection that sometimes gets ignored in conversations and reviews, which rings true—it’s a very funny book, and some of the pieces, like “The Story Here,” read as straight-up dysfunctional comedy. Is there any aspect of Bad Things Happen that you think gets overplayed in those same conversations and reviews?
Kris Bertin: Thanks for saying that. I wrote the stories in this book over a long period of time, so I think of each of them as being very different, but one tack a hasty reviewer can take is to simplify and categorize everything you’ve done. No one who puts together a collection is trying to write the same thing over and over; all of us try to vary it by tone and character, conflict, themes, and a bunch of other factors. So I feel like for most short story collections—and for this one—we’re working toward different goals. I want it to be a rainbow and a capsule reviewer wants to call it orange. It’s unavoidable.
 
But, to be specific, when someone says these stories are “dark” or “gritty” or about “outsiders,” they’re wrong. Some are about those things, sure, but they’re also about middle-class moms and falling in love and small towns and ghosts. Some are difficult, some are depressing, but they’re also playful, sometimes melancholy.
 
CE: There’s an intense level of description throughout the book that runs from people (“She did have a scar on her stomach, but it was going in the wrong direction.”) to settings (“My door is too wide for the doorway, but also too short.”) to smells (“...that pulpy hamster-cage odour that develops when no air circulates.”). Does this kind of observation come naturally to you, or is it something you’ve had to cultivate? At what point in your writing process does description come in?
KB: When I describe something, it’s usually just a manifestation of what’s particularly vivid to me during the act of imagination. Some pieces pass by, unimportant, but sometimes there’s an element that, if made real by an image, will convey something to the audience that I can’t otherwise communicate. I feel like there’s no reason to slow things down unless you have something to show, so I’m content to use short sentences and ordinary description up until there’s something I want to share, something vivid or challenging, or something I’ve seen in real life that I can’t get out of my head.
 
As for its origins, I guess it’s something that comes naturally. I don’t know many writers who aren’t astute observers, so it’s probably part of the package for most of us. Paying attention counts, always, but it counts double if you’re the kind of weird person who walks around, trying to save up enough thoughts and ideas throughout the day so that they can arrange them in a little word mosaic when you finally get home.
 
CE: One review of Bad Things Happen on Goodreads states that “there was nothing to really RELATE to, as it was a level of wallowing and belly crawling reserved for thee sheer garbage of society,” which I found interesting and a bit funny, if inaccurate—the book is actually quite relatable. Does it matter to you how your work is read? Do you even care if readers find your characters relatable?
 
KB: Goodreads reviews are a laff riot, and that is definitely a good one. Goodreads was created for people to promote and share their love of books, but has instead morphed into a weird literary Youtube comments section. Me, Kevin Hardcastle, and Andrew Sullivan all got attacked by the same person (a troll who didn’t write reviews for any other books, except for ours), saying that we were “offensive.” I love that review. It’s a badge of honour to me:

Even more offensive characters. Title makes me think this is young adult literature.
Author's bio, if it's real, is hilarious. The Great Gatsby himself is now writing fiction.
 
Do I want the work to be relatable? Yes, absolutely. I want to make accessible work that doesn’t presuppose a certain level of education, or experience. I want characters who, even if you can’t imagine being them or in their situation, you can understand their motivations and actions, and how it might feel to be them. But do I worry about being misread? Not really. I can’t worry about this stuff. The vast wasteland of self-obsessed, childish and insane Goodreads contributors is a great example of why I shouldn’t.
 
CE: Work is a recurring theme throughout the collection, from service industry to petty criminality, with many characters barely maintaining or on the cusp of losing jobs they don’t particularly enjoy. If you weren’t, like the rest of us, financially dependent on working, would you still work anyway?
KB: Well, writing is work, and I don’t plan on ever stopping that, so yes. But if you’re asking whether I’d continue doing a different job as well, the answer is probably yes. If money was no longer a concern, I think I’d like to do community work—volunteer a men’s shelter (likely the one where a lot of my customers come from), or something like that. I would do that now, if I had more time, and routinely feel shitty about myself for not helping out in that way.
 
I will say, though, that I really do love bartending. I love when it’s dead and I get to talk with and meet different people, and when it’s not, I love the pressure of being busy and trying to do everything perfectly, trying to solve five problems at once. I love being behind the bar, making drinks, taking care of people, making sure they’re safe and no one’s bothering them. I’m not convinced it’s something I would ever be able to fully leave behind. Throughout the years my home bar has gotten bigger and bigger and now I’m at the point where I’m always ready for a spontaneous forty-person party (which has never happened).
 
CE: You’ve been posting some older stories—ones that didn’t appear in Bad Things Happen—on your website for free, with write-ups about where they came from and why they didn’t make the cut. When you look at your older work, what do you see? What has changed in your writing between then and now?
KB: I think the stories I put on the website are good ones. The truly terrible, unreadable stuff will never be shared, but the ones I put up are so old that I don’t have any bad feelings about them whatsoever. I find if you’ve put something aside, it’s easy to hate it while it’s relatively fresh, but as it ages, it solidifies. It’s no longer malleable, and your feelings about how to fix it, or what ought to have happened vanish. You’re not thinking about the same things, or in the same way anymore. So it just becomes inert. A story you couldn’t write now, because your concerns are different, your life is different. The materials are out of stock, the methodology lost. I don’t know how I would go about making another “Boardwalk at Midnight” or “Gorilla Painting.”
 
What I see in those stories is a lot of uncertainty about the future, a lot of anxiety about love and career, a preoccupation with—what I think the back of the book says—“who we are, and what we want to be.” I think that last part will always be what I’m interested in, but the big difference with what I’ve been doing lately is that I’ve moved away from smaller, more personal stories, and tried to branch out into the more complicated and even stranger world of everybody else. The story “The Narrow Passage”—about peering into the naked lives of people by what they leave behind (in the trash)—was my newest story in the Bad Things Happen, and the one that most embodies these ideas.
 
CE: You’ve been working on a couple of novels and some much longer short stories. How does the process of writing long prose differ from writing short prose?
KB: This is obvious, I’m sure, but it takes a lot longer to do a big one than a little one. The form is different but the process isn’t really. I think, in some ways, longer stories can be trickier, because they make you think you have room that you probably don’t. It’s easy to think you’re taking time to explore something when really, you’re just meandering. So in writing a 10,000–15,000 word story, there’s a lot more editing, a lot more drafts, a lot more ghost passages floating around, unsure of their place until the very end when it all comes together.
 
CE: You’ve had a successful few years, with over a dozen stories appearing in journals and anthologies, and now a well-received collection under your belt. At what point in your career, if at all, did you become comfortable describing your self as a writer?
KB: I am a writer, but it’s not something I’d ever bring up at work. Even the copies of my book I have behind the bar are for people in the know who ask about it. I’ll identify as a writer when I’m in the right place, but otherwise I think going around talking about it is weird. Why would you do that unless you want attention for it? I don’t. I think focusing on the author is a mistake, too. Who we are isn’t interesting, what we make is.
 
The book has criminals and drug addicts and heartache and a ten-foot tall god in green robes. It has garbage collector-hillbilly feuds and little girls breaking into houses. It tracks the journey of a window-cleaner who becomes a telemarketing fraudster in Montreal, then returns home to absolve himself by becoming an exterminator in rural PEI. I can talk about that all day long. But me, and my role in it is boring. It’s like if you had a machine that could see people’s dreams, but instead you just look at the poor sap quivering on the bed in his jammies.

Wow, look, he’s really sweaty. Look at his eyelids. His hands keep opening and closing.

Turn on the Dream-O-Tron, for God’s sake! Let’s have a look in there! 

Christopher Evans’ fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Grain, Feathertale, Joyland, The Canary Press, The Moth, and others. He lives in Vancouver, BC, where he is the Prose Editor of PRISM international magazine.