writing, everything that writer is should be available to him or her at the moment of composition. I don't think that was the way I wrote over the years. I think a lot of the things I was writing, because I was writing personae, didn't have that much available. I think Kroetsch noticed this when he commented on War and Other Measures--that it was an important and profound narrative in a way, but that what it lacked was the extraneous personal details coming in and giving it texture and giving it a kind of odd authority, the authority of the personal rather than the authority of the voice out there. What I like about the new Orkney stuff I'm doing is that more of what I am and what I know is accessible to those poems. Barry: In that poem you mention problems with the dinner which is a very literal fact, but when you are actually writing a poem you're given, then anything can become relevant: a broken shoelace in juxtaposition with a political atrocity. Gary: Well yeah, and of course, I never took anybody out for the perogies in the North of Edmonton (laugh) and then had a discussion about The English Patient. Andy Suknaski took me out twenty-five years ago for perogies in the North of Edmonton, but we weren't lovers and we weren't talking about this or that, but somehow my problems with Jan and my broken marriage, and the questions of how are things going, and the kinds of questions that lovers have at intense moments forced me to construct a narrative and it seemed fun to try and do it around The English Patient to see where that would go. Barry: Being thumbless is maybe a requirement ... Gary: Exactly! (laugh) Barry: For me writing gets interesting when you lose yourself in the language and you start to write something that veers in another direction- or brings in a detail that you remember from thirty years ago that becomes so clear, so important, and is emotionally moving. Gary: Yes, like the anecdote about the colonel who cut his grandchild's throat is something I've had in my head and tried to write for years. I more or less had it written, but realized I could never publish it because it didn't run along anywhere. Barry: It works as an incidental detail, but not as a poem. Gary: That's right. In my younger time I'd have been trying to ring too much significance out of that one incident, rather than just to have it as a fleeting moment in a poem. Barry: And to have the drama of that moment emerge at the