we are living at the expense not just of nature, but of all the other people in the world. And, it horrifies me. I have to write about it. The incidents in the poem "Sunday Drive in August" actually happened to me. My son really does roll his eyes at me when I say things. I became this sort of nagging voice in the background, as I am in this poem, and I got tired of always complaining about the things that bother me so much. For one thing, you bore everybody to tears. Nobody wants to hear me complain. I had to write this poem because even if I sound like the voice of gloom when I'm saying "Yes, all very well to buy those carpets, but look what's underneath them. They're full of that plastic glue. Wouldn't you be better off with hard wood?" I want my children to know that there are alternatives to that incredible plastic consumerism. Dee: Are you familiar with Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift From The Sea? Jacqueline Baldwin: I read that in about 1968. It made me feel relieved that there wasn't something wrong with me. Most people that I met in the 60's didn't understand one thing that I was talking about. They thought that every single thing that was done, what they called development, was good, and I could only see it as destruction. For example, the entire Lower Fraser Valley was sprayed with DDT in the 1960's for mosquitoes. My daughter Morgan was born in 1968, and the day that that plane flew over I decided to leave. I moved north. Dee: Can you also discuss the significance of landscape in your writing? Jacqueline Baldwin: I'm particularly fond of wilderness landscape, obviously or I wouldn't have chosen to live in the north. The earth, of which I am a part, is the landscape. I do have that connection with the earth. I owe the earth for the privilege of living. If I'm going to live here, I owe the earth to put everything I can back into it. Karin: Animals, both domesticated and wild, play a prominent role in a number of your poems. Your poems include wolves, cows, German shepherds, collies. Margaret Atwood has discussed the portrayal of animals as victims in Canadian literature. How do you represent them in your work? Jacqueline Baldwin: I don't see animals as victims. In the poem "Five Wolves Up the Path from the River," that wolf, the black one, was an actual wolf that I once saw. It died, but the real victim in this poem is this man who has the chance to walk the earth, appreciating a connection to other species and the earth. He becomes the victim because he has no