Mystery and Mischief in Poetry: Canadian Writer Susan Musgrave
Susan Musgrave
BY Bruce Stotesbury The editor would like to thank Ursula Vaira, publisher of Leaf Press, for her kind generosity and assistance. |
Of Susan Musgrave’s life, one that defies all conventions and definitions, where should we begin? Raised on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Susan Musgrave “dropped out” of school at fourteen, was admitted to a mental hospital even though she was not “mad,” and published her maiden poetry book, Songs of the Sea Witch, at nineteen. She travelled widely and later married a criminal lawyer, after returning to the Queen Charlotte Islands from Ireland. This marriage lasted four years; through her former husband (who acted as one of the five defence lawyers), Musgrave met and fell in love with a convicted marijuana smuggler, who later became her second husband and father of her first daughter.
One day after her second divorce, Musgrave received a manuscript from a convicted bank-robber, Stephen Reid, who was serving a twenty-year sentence at Millhaven Penitentiary in Ontario. She read the manuscript, fell in love with the protagonist, and married the author in 1986, while he was still in prison. His novel, Jackrabbit Parole, was published the same year. The couple’s lives were the subject of a CBC “Life and Times” documentary, The Poet and the Bandit, which aired in January 1999. Stephen Reid was released from prison on Day Parole, January 2008, after serving an eighteen year sentence for another bank robbery in 1999. Despite turmoils in life, Susan Musgrave remains one of the most well-loved writers in Canada, devoted to leading a creative and profound life in all aspects. Author of more than twenty books, including the poetry collection What the Small Day Cannot Hold: Collected Poems 1970-1985 (Beach Holme, 2000); the novel Cargo of Orchids (Knopf, 2003); You’re in Canada Now… A Memoir of Sorts (Thistledown, 2005); and the forthcoming poetry collection Origami Dove (McClelland & Stewart, 2011), she has received numerous awards for all genres of writing, as well as for her work as an editor. Her prizes include the most recent Lifetime Achievement Award by Pandora’s Collective. Currently, she teaches in the University of British Columbia’s Optional-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Programme. She lives on Haida Gwaii, and also runs a beautiful guesthouse, the Copper Beech House, with her younger daughter, Sophie Reid. Visit www.susanmusgrave.com. |
 Obituary of Light From the Publisher:“This new book of poems is a sequence of reflections, of mindful blessings, on the everyday goings-on around her home on the Sangan River, ten miles outside Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands/Haida Gwaii. They were written the year her friend, a local beachcomber, Paul Bower, whose logs were used to build her seven-sided house, died of lung cancer.” |
You have dipped your pen in many different kinds of writings, but not plays. Why not? Have you thought about writing plays and working in the theater? I am always interested in writing something I haven’t attempted before. I usually wait until someone approaches me with an idea, and then the work takes shape as I mull it over. I have written a play — a radio play — it was called “How Long it Takes to Fall.” I wrote it on a freighter coming from Ireland to Canada in 1972. It was never produced. How do you gain access to the different energies and interiority asked by the varied genres of writing? Is the process of “switching gears” something you could talk about? Different aspects of my nature seem suited to different genres. I find a place for my blackly humorous side in personal essays (creative nonfiction). Poetry stems from deep grief, or from falling in love (two sides of the same coin, inevitably). Prose is a deeply neurotic process for me — as Ezra Pound said, “the process of the purgation, and therefore negative in content.” He said poetry, in contrast, was the “positive celebration of an image or thought long pondered.” Poetry is the most mischievous of all. It has a way of insisting on being written, particularly when I have a deadline for a newspaper column, or a rewrite of a novel that is overdue. Your newest book of poems, Obituary of Light, is a moving and profound collection that weaves between grief, sadness, contemplation, nature, and silence. How did you juggle with the intensity, privacy and authenticity of specific emotions, energies and images during the process of creating a work of art? I do not consciously juggle anything when I write. I just sit down, put pen to paper, and I write. It is not an intellectual process. Where poems come from is a mystery, and why they choose to come is a mystery, too. In Obituary of Light, you also wrote “If you ask me / again what I want it is to make / peace with the part of me that insists / I exist…” Beyond the word, what is meaningful in life for you? How would you like to reach out towards a wider humanity? I don’t find very much that is meaningful in life. Nature, of course, and a few people. My family. I am surprised when I find people have read my work and feel a connection. I believe a writer’s work has very little to do with her, or him. A reader is looking for something, and finds it in a writer’s work. People read to find out about themselves, not about the writer. |
accompanied by accordionist Dominic Legere
Masset in Haida Gwaii
(Queen Charlotte Islands)
PHOTO COURTESY OF URSULA VAIRA,
PUBLISHER OF LEAF PRESS
Amidst storms in life, what helps you to keep intact and grounded, both as a human being and as an artist?
Being outside, in the wilds of Haida Gwaii where I live. Watching the waves roll in and roll out again, listening to the wind and the waves crashing on the beach all night: this puts my life in perspective.
What do you hold as sacred in your poetry?
The wilderness. I once had a Sierra Club poster that said, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world.”
Between being the observer and being observed, how do the subject and the images come into composition in your poems? How do you relate to your images?
In answer to the second part of the question, in a visceral way. The images I use are a way of making physical the emotional trials and tribulations I experience in my life. Therefore there are a lot of overt violent images, in direct proportion to the emotional damage that has been done.
The phrase “earning a living as a writer” may come across as a North American, mainstream convention. How do you resist the industrial forces and social labels from a so-called cultural or literary scene that may, on the flip side, help bring a readership to your writings?
I have only ever been interested in the process of writing, not the product, or the end result. I love language; I love spending a whole day trying to decide where to break a line. I don’t think about “readership.” I would be overwhelmed if I allowed myself to think in those kinds of terms.
What are your thoughts about the narcissism and self-indulgence of a writer?
I dislike writers who are egotistical and full of their own importance. Luckily I don’t have to be around those types of people. I prefer my friends not to be writers. Writers always want to steal your lines or your stories. Real people (as I call them) have stories of their own well worth listening to (and stealing, of course!)
accompanied by accordionist Dominic Legere
Masset in Haida Gwaii
(Queen Charlotte Islands)
PHOTO COURTESY OF URSULA VAIRA,
PUBLISHER OF LEAF PRESS
Do you dream? What are some dreams that still linger in your memory?
My dream life used to be far more exciting than my waking life. Consequently I spent a lot of time sleeping and dreaming, when I was younger. Much of my poetry came from my dreams. My dreams were often visionary, and I would be left, for days, with feelings far more intense than I had ever felt from anything that had happened in my waking life. For instance, the sadness, the grief, I would feel in a dream was far more unbearable than anything I felt in “reality.” Now it isn’t that way. I haven’t had a memorable dream in a long time. I read somewhere recently that the older you get, the less you dream. Can that be true? Are dreams like eggs in a woman’s body? Are you born with a certain number of dreams, which then — dry up and cease to be?
What often proves to be difficult for you during the creative journey?
Getting started. Making the transition from the world of washing dishes and sweeping the floor and chopping wood and making meals to sitting down and entering a fictional world via a blank sheet of paper. I will do almost anything to avoid getting to work. And then, when the work starts going well, I don’t want to leave the world I have invented for myself.
What are some of your favorite words?
I love discovering new words — which is what happens when you read poetry and fiction. I discovered “rebarbative” in an Iris Murdoch novel. In New York my poetry was described as causing one’s skin to “horripilate”. (That is a word I bandy about, needless to say.) I used “lugubrious” in one of my children’s books: “Hello, you lugubrious grey-eyed cat,” said Grim. What have you got to feel so lugubrious about?” I love Anglo-Saxon words: dark, wet, wind, rain, cold, and so on.
Artists share a special relationship with their living spaces. Could you describe the character of your house, and your creative space?
I’ve written an essay on this subject. Here are some passages from it:
When I was very young my father used to read Uncle Rhemus Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit, and I was fascinated. Brer Rabbit begged and pleased with Brer Foz to do anything to him — boil him alive in hot tar, eviscerate him, eat him for dinner — but NOT to throw him in the briar patch, where, it turned out, he’d been bred and born. And precisely where he wanted to be.
From the moment my foot went through the punky front porch, this house, my home, belonged to me. And I belonged here. I’d grown up in the same kind of rusticity, my mother complaining about the lack of foundations, sloping-away floors, and self-ventilating walls. Whenever the wind blew and the roof leaked my father would say to her, “Why let a little thing like having to put a saucepan in the middle of our bed to catch a few drips come between us? What do you think this is — the Ritz?”
Susan Musgrave working in her house
in Haida Gwaii
BY Charlotte Musgrave
Carl Jung described a house as an extension of the unconscious, “a kind of representation of one’s innermost thoughts.” Since my husband and I moved in twelve years ago neither of us has had much time to think about our thoughts; we’ve been too busy fighting with the extension ladder. A day hasn’t passed when we haven’t had to tear down a wall, replace a rotten floorboard, or patch a leaky ceiling. When our multichild family outgrew a single bedroom lifestyle, we simply added on, so that the house has grown around us. It has also grown to embody our personalities.
Witold Rybczynski, in his book The Most Beautiful House in the World, says that by living in a house we make it alive. If we think of buildings as clothes, a house should be like a worn and carefully patched jacket that takes the shape of its wearer over time and becomes a sort of second skin.
He also says that houses should shelter daydreaming, that our houses take life in our imaginations. Which is why the places that people have fashioned for themselves are more touching than those — no matter how splendid — that others have made for them.
Last week I drove my daughter to visit a new friend in Eagle’s Nest Estates. The hill has been clearcut: not a tree left for an eagle to nest in. We all know the syndrome: you name the development after what has been destroyed to make room for it. It’s our culture’s way of paying tribute to what has gone before.
My daughter has reached an age when she is beginning to want answers to difficult questions: not where do babies come from, but why do we have to live in a dump with no foundations, sloping floors, a leaking roof and walls you can see daylight through?
She contemplates her plight as we drive by a row of mock Georgian ranchettes with electric wishing wells and a series of Tuscan Gothic bungalows with self-vacuuming eaves troughs designed for homeowners who think “upkeep” means turning a key in a lock. I tell her, our dump may not be dripping in elegance like these key-ready ranchettes, but it exhibits something, to me, that is more precious, what Rybczyski calls “the moving loveliness of human occupation.” Our house, with a real heart and soul and real eyes to see with, is evidence of how human beings can transform a place, “not by grand design but by the small celebrations of everyday life.” Ours may not be anyone else’s idea of a “dream home” but our house contains our dreams.
Could you also share some of the favorite philosophies that you practise/seek to exercise in life?
I try to read some Buddhist teachings every day. I try to meditate, too, and I read poetry first thing in the morning instead of reading the newspaper. A quotation that comes to mind (and a quotation to I would like to live by) is, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”
Printed from Cerise Press: http://www.cerisepress.com
Permalink URL: https://www.cerisepress.com/02/06/mystery-and-mischief-in-poetry-canadian-writer-susan-musgrave
