Tom Cull: What is your first memory of writing creatively?
Tanis Rideout: I didn’t really start writing, at least as far as I remember, until quite late. I wrote for classes, of course, terrible poems for assignments, but I didn’t write for myself.

I have very early memories of reading on long road trips out to the east coast, curled up  in the trunk of our hatchback, something that I’m sure is very illegal now, but not writing.

Rather when I was little I would play at being a scientist. I had a lab in my closet. I probably wrote some lab reports. Maybe that counts.

TC: You are both a novelist and poet. Does each format require a different ways of thinking? Do your habits of mind or process change depending on whether you are writing poetry or prose?
TR: I’m not sure that they so much require different ways of thinking, as they have slightly different foci. I use a lot of the same tools in both though. Language—the sound of it, the rhythm of it—is of fundamental importance to me in both realms, using it as the building block of voice, POV and the like. I think I bring that from the poetry world to the prose. I think voice and arc are things that I bring from the prose world and use them in different ways in poetry.

What I will say is that I cannot write poetry if I’m not reading it. I think more in prose than in poetry for sure.

TC: What is the best piece of writing advice that you’ve been given? Have you been given any bad advice?
TR: The best advice—keep going. I sort of feel like the poster child for stick-to-it-ness sometimes.
And for me, keeping going isn’t just about perseverance in general, but also about trying to keep pushing at the work, not letting it stand, but editing, changing, keep making it better, stronger both on specific projects and in the broader sense.

The other really good piece of advice I got was from Joseph Boyden just as my novel was about to come out. He said, "You’re not one book. You better already be thinking about the next thing."

Bad advice--maybe I just ignored it, or I had good teachers, because nothing is really coming to mind. Rather, I think I tend to know whether or not something will work for me, and if it won’t I don’t follow it.

TC: Both your novel and your poetry collection are built on the architecture of historical fact—George Mallory’s third attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest inspires Above All Things, while Arguments with the Lake draws on the history of Marilyn Bell and Shirley Campbell, two teenage distance swimmers who rose to fame in their attempts to swim Lake Ontario in the 1950s.  What is it that attracts you to history as a jumping off point for fiction?
TR: I love history. I love historical fiction. I certainly think when I started writing, it was easier for me to see the drama in something far removed from me, from my immediate world, and I think there’s a component of fantasy in that kind of writing for me—exploring different times, thinking of who people might have been in those times. And they’re both such great stories: the possibilities they provided were exciting to me.

I think with both those stories it was the character as much as the circumstances and setting that drew me in.

TC: Both Above All Things, and Arguments with the Lake, are built on early-to-mid nineteenth-century tales of human attempts to triumph over nature. What do you find compelling about these narratives? Is the work of a writer analogous to the tasks your heroes set for themselves?
TR: I think in some ways there is some comparison amongst swimming long distance, climbing, writing a novel. They’re all decisions that you have to keep making. You don’t decide to just do it and that’s it. You have to make the decision each day, with each stroke, each step. And I like how that’s also really what life is too—deciding each day, who you want to be, how you want to live. It’s all micro decisions.

I think these human versus nature stories really appeal to me because they terrify me. Movies like K2 or Touching the Void—those are my horror movies. They scare me far more than zombies or haunted houses or what have you. How we pit ourselves against the world or try and live in it, whether we try to conquer it or embrace it, there’s something endlessly interesting about that. How powerless we are in the face of nature, and how deep that can make people dig.

TC: In both of your books, geological entities (Everest, Lake Ontario) are more than simple features of the landscape—they become entities with whom your characters form intimate relationships. In the first pages of Above All Things, Ruth says to George, “tell me about this mountain that’s stealing you away from me.” Likewise, in Arguments with the Lake, we learn that Marilyn retires from competitive swimming, telling the papers that “there’s no room in a marriage for a lake.” How, in your work, does nature triangulate human relationships?  
TR: We’re intimately connected to place. It’s something I continue to think about. I lived in a number of landscapes growing up and I’m really interested in how those things inform us personally, artistically.
And I think that we really only begin to understand ourselves and the world when we engage with landscape—this thing that is bigger than us, but that we’re a part of. I think narrative is connected to place and it’s the way I’m best able to understand landscape and environment. I’m not sure I can separate them out.

TC: Your stories of nineteenth-century triumph over nature seem uncannily premonitory. I cannot, for example, think of the legacy of Mallory without also thinking about contemporary images of Everest as strewn with garbage and besieged by long lineups of rich thrill-seekers waiting for their chance to plant their flag. How do you understand these nineteenth-century narratives from our current moment of environmental collapse?
TR: For me the past landscape and its treatment are absolutely connected to what they are today. You can see in the initial attempts on Everest these precursors to what it has become. Even at the time these were well-to-do men, who could take time away from work, pay most, if not all, of their own way to the mountain, etc. The notion of conquering, of owning, or taking over, is part of what I hope we’re starting to examine in terms of environmental consciousness now. I certainly was thinking about the current state of the mountain, or the lake, while I was writing, and wanted the work to hopefully gesture to that without being anachronistic, without spelling it out. But the men leave their trash there. The mountain is already becoming ugly and scarred by them. The remains of those expeditions still occasionally show up.

TC: You do environmental justice work around Great Lakes water protection and preservation. How does this work inform your writing?
TR: I’ve been doing work with Lake Ontario Waterkeeper for several years now. Arguments grew out of my relationship with them, with how they asked me to start thinking about the lake, to start taking ownership of it, responsibility for it. It’s something I think about a lot now, when travelling, when reading. It’s been a new lens through which I view how we interact with much of the natural world—where we live, how we build, who we create.

I’m not entirely sure how this will continue to come out in my writing, other than to say that it’s something that is generally there in the back of my head and so inevitably percolates in some ways.

TC: You are writer-in-residence at Western this year which entails, among other things, working with many young writers who learning writing fundamentals. Has helping these students made you reflect on your own writing?  If so, how?
TR: Writing is writing is writing. The tools are always the same. It’s actually been really fantastic to read other people’s work on a weekly basis. Regardless of skill level, when I read someone’s work closely and then sit to talk with them about where it could go, what might make it stronger, it’s then something that returns to me when I approach my own work.

If I talk with someone about how their character needs to want something, I then realize, well, so should mine. Or if I’ve just chatted with someone about POV or tense or something, it’s then something I’m thinking about very specifically when I sit down again.

TC: What are you currently working on?
TR: I’m working on a new novel. There are no mountains or lakes in it. Well, not really. So far. 

Description from the publisher:

In 1954, at the age of sixteen, Marilyn Bell became the first person to swim across Lake Ontario. It brought her fame and adulation; her life seemed charmed. Enter Shirley Campbell, another young swimmer whose accomplishments were poised to rival Bell’s, but in falling short in her own attempts to cross the Great Lake, she found herself spiralling out of control into a life of addiction, petty crime, and personal tragedies.

Tanis Rideout weaves the tales of these two remarkable women together in a series of stunning, lyrical poems. It is a story of courage and triumph, but also one of adversity and redemption. This is an exhilarating book of poetry, at once tender and terrifying; like a cold dip in Lake Ontario, it will engulf you and leave you breathless. Arguments with the Lake confirms Rideout’s arrival as a major new talent in Canadian letters.

Pigeons make their way by magnetic, the trigeminal nerve,
Branched in their brains makes ninety degree turns, orients
by atmospheric odor.

The lake’s skin smells of a father’s garage: gasoline, aftershave
and repeating Sunday leftovers. A refrain on the tongue
pasted with pablum and honey: North.

Swim north and I’ll find you. But there’s no moon, no
line where the city, meets the sky, meets the offing.
The body is an astrolabe, the pull of home in her skull.

Tom Cull teaches creative writing in the English and Writing Studies Program at Western University. His chapbook, What the Badger Said, was published in 2013 by Baseline Press. 

JULIE BRUCK is the author of three collections of poems from Brick Books: Monkey Ranch (2012), The End of Travel (1999), and The Woman Downstairs (1993). La Singerie, William S. Messier’s French translation of  Monkey Ranch, was published in 2013, and is available from Les Editions Triptyque. Her awards and fellowships include, Canada’s 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, The A.M. Klein Award for Poetry, two Pushcart Prize nominations, Gold Canadian National Magazine Awards (twice), a Sustainable Arts Foundation Promise Award, as well as grants from The Canada Council for the Arts, and a Catherine Boettcher Fellowship from The MacDowell Colony. She lives in San Francisco’s foggy Inner Sunset district with her husband, the writer Lewis Buzbee, their daughter Maddy, and two enormous geriatric goldfish.

RUSTY TALK WITH JULIE BRUCK

Tom Cull: What is your earliest memory of writing creatively?
Julie Bruck: When I was quite little I wrote a rhymed poem that began, "Nonsense is so many things,/ bats with hats and cats with wings." My mother made a huge fuss over it, but I wasn't as impressed. I never really felt engaged by writing as a kid. I preferred drawing, or being outside--preferably with live, rather than imaginary animals.

TC: As a child, did you read poetry? Was poetry a part of your childhood?
JB: Poetry was read aloud in our home, and valued. My mother wrote poems and studied with Irving Layton, and went on to publish her first chapbook in her mid-80's. My father liked to quote Ogden Nash and lyrics from Gilbert & Sullivan. There was a lot of word-play in the house. My two older brothers tortured me with names I didn't understand, like "perpetrator of arm-chair methods" or "petit bourgeois scum." Eventually, the dictionary became a survival tool.

TC: How did you become a writer?
JB: I wasn't drawn to writing until my early 20's. I was studying photography and art history and took a fiction workshop at Concordia University as an elective. My stories were awful, but that class woke me to the kinships between poetry and photography, especially how both were a matter of framing, and how crucial the placement of that frame could be. That fit with my way of seeing the world. I was really adrift at that time in my life, and I think that process offered an illusion of order. It also made my work too drum-tight and over-determined, but there would be time to work on that later.

TC: You were born and raised in Montreal but now live in San Francisco. How has this transplant affected your poetry?
JB: My relationship to home was always hyphenated, especially as an Anglo in Quebec, so being a Canadian in the U.S. felt oddly familiar. I think becoming a mother at 41 was the bigger shift, and certainly one that had an effect on my work. As a parent, it's harder to draw lines between what's personal and what transpires in the larger world. The traffic between those two realities figure in my writing.

TC: Your website describes you as both “poet and teacher.” Can you talk about the relationship between writing poetry and teaching poetry?
JB: Much of my teaching focuses on generating new work, and I emphasize the importance of surprise in the writing process, as well as during revision. The bold examples of my students help keep me honest. They are almost always receptive to trying new strategies and approaches. They remind me to practice what I preach, and I'm grateful for it.

TC: Can you describe your writing process? How does revision figure into the process?
JB: While most first drafts come quickly and freely, I am glacially slow from that point on, and can spend years on a poem before it's either ready to leave the house, or be consigned to a dusty folder. Revision is crucial and I print every draft. I am not, alas, good for the forests. So often though, the most creative moments take place during re-writing, even years after the rush of a  first draft. Sometimes, it takes that long just to step out of the poem's way. Those moments are worth waiting for. They're exhilarating.

TC: Do you have any advice for newer poets who struggle with evaluating feedback from their peers?  When should a poet bend to critique and when should a poet stick to his or her guns?
JB: I think how you respond to input depends on temperament and experience, among other things, so it's hard to give boiler-plate advice. On the other hand, it can be very useful to soak up feedback from your mentors and peers (and from your reading) when you're "new" at poetry. Sure, the poem belongs to you, and no-one can "steal your voice" and you can always revert to your original version. Ultimately, though, the poem must also belong to the reader, and your colleagues can be great indicators of how and what that poem is communicating. Good readers can also keep you open to what the poem might be reaching for, even if that differs from the poem you set out to write. This can teach you to read your own words on the page, which might already have better plans for themselves..

TC: You have spoken elsewhere of your poetry being characterized as “accessible.” Is accessibility important to you as an artist? Is it something you strive for in your writing or is it just the way you write? 
JB: Sometimes I regret using that word. Accessibility gets a bad rap, as if it suggests poems which suit the reading habits of a well-meaning duck. What I'm after in my work, and what I look for when I read, is clarity. I find that the clearer a thing is, the more mystery it possesses. I do not equate confusion with mystery.

TC: Confinement and threshold seem to be recurring themes in Monkey Ranch. Whether it be a Howler Monkey in a zoo cage, a race-horse (“a gleaming ton of coiled muscle”) standing ready at the gates, a shark in a sling being released into the ocean, or even the “liquefied sunlight” trapped between two doors of a vestibule, your poems seem to characterize people, animals, and things as either caught between and/or poised to break out. Do thresholds hold a particular significance in your poetry? Do you see your poetry as negotiating a relationship between confinement and freedom?
JB: What a terrific question!  Someone else recently characterized my work as  "the poetry of aftermath", but thresholds and the negotiations between confinement and freedom certainly resonate. There's a line in my first book, The Woman Downstairs, in which the speaker describes herself and her entourage as "always on the threshold of some promised definition." I think part of this interest in being on the verge has to do with an adolescent quality that I keep expecting to outgrow--the idea that we're all in a state of perpetual  emergence, and that on the other side of that process, everything will be clear. Ha!

I think these cusps also reflect the tension between the (apparent) simplicity of innocence and the endless complications of knowledge. It's a tension that's so beautifully dramatized in Elizabeth Bishop's poetry, and your question helps me explain the abiding affection I have for her work. It's also a tension that's inherent in raising children, and in being with animals, since both are so vulnerable to the caprices of human adults. Finally, thresholds always signal some kind of change—that uneasy, and most interesting part of human affairs. Adrienne Rich said, "The moment of change is the only poem." That's a quote I carry in my head, and if I was 30 years younger, it might be a tattoo.

TC: Monkey Ranch is both the title of your book, and the title of one of the book’s more disquieting poems.  The “monkey farm” in this poem is one of the many cages or prisons found in this collection. But the title also seems to be a play on “Monkey-Wrench,” a tool that derives its name from the nautical meaning of “monkey” as any provisional tool designed to suit an immediate purpose.  To this connotation must be added “monkey” as meaning “mimic,” “mock” and “play around.”  All of these meanings seem alive in this collection—often simultaneously. Can you say something about the choice of the title and how it works as a sign that marks the entrance to your poetry zoo?
 JB: Monkey Ranch was my choice for the book's title, though my editor was resistant. She didn't feel that the poem was representative of the collection as a whole. She also thought the title, especially in concert with the crazy cover image, suggested a lighter book than I'd written. I could see her point. As a title poem, "Monkey Ranch" is more surreal than most of the other pieces, but I felt quite certain that it knit together various themes and impulses that ran through the book. Thematically, those included the caging you point to, creatures, family life, and the ways we often recall and talk about painful memories, but only selectively. As far as the word-play in the book title, you've nailed it! This was a tricky book to order and shape because of the variations in voice and tone from poem to poem. The potential wordplay in the title was intended to pick up a playful thread that also runs through the collection. My hope was that giving a slightly stretchy title to what is, at heart, one of the darkest pieces, would speak to what the book as a whole presents.  I think you said it best: that all these meanings inhabit our monkey lives, "often simultaneously."  Thanks! That's exactly what I was after.

TC: What are you currently working on?
JB: I'm writing new poems and just letting the drafts stack up. It will likely take another year before I start rearranging them into anything remotely bookish.

EXCERPT FROM MONKEY RANCH

MONKEY RANCH

Our monkeys were striped
green and yellow, except
for the red and white ones.
Outside the house, a screaming
kaleidoscope of stripes chased
stripes, until they settled
in the branches at dusk,
to pick each other's nits. 

Father tired of monkey
farming, took a job in town.
We starved our monkeys.
Day by day, they slowed,
and when I picture them now,
or dream of how it was,
they stagger in the black
and white of old newsreels.

It took them a whole year
to die off while we watched.
In those days, children did
as they were told, and Mother
always favored chinchillas.
But they used to wear such
cute little monkey hats--
red, white, yellow, and green.



THE CHANGE

So, I’ve done what my body was made for.
My eight-year-old is all legs, careening
down the basketball court, and I do

acknowledge the pulls and pushes of tides,
moons, of love and such, even if I stop short
at crystals and meet-the-plankton music.

My husband hums in the house, 
my daughter sings while she plays.
I’m hunched at the kitchen table,

jaw clenched, staring down a blank
grocery list when that stringy mouse,
the one who holds keys to this place,

scrabbles across the awful linoleum
for the first time today and my shriek
is so sudden and muscular and primal

I know I’ve pulled something in my neck.  
If this new Tin Cat™ does its job, I swear
I’ll carry the jumpy, humane contraption

straight to the park in my bathrobe,
calmly raise the metal lid and let
the mouse go with a kind, steady hand.

I’ll be better than I am,
pretend to love
this creature I'd rather drown.  

What does it mean to love
the life we've been given?