understanding of the sacredness of this connection; animals are trying to teach us something. The man can't see that if he watched those wolves, and listened to them, he could understand the sacred. Instead, he shoots the wolf. He puts it up on his wall so he can be a big shot in the eyes of other human beings. So I see him as a victim. Dee: Your wonderful sense of humour comes through in your writing. Can you discuss the importance of humour and specifically, how and why it is important to you and to your writing? Jacqueline Baldwin: Humour is very important to me. When I was raising my children I suppose that I used humour as a tool. When they were upset, I could distract their attention with humour. It's one of the greatest gifts in my relationship with my children. I can't live without humour, and I find that if I,m not living my life right it's because humour has gone out of my life. Karin: You capture the idiolects, dialects of specific characters/people in your poems. In "Big Al's Buddy," I particularly like the Newfoundlander who comments on the expensive working vest purchased by a fellow employee: "Lard Jesus Al! God almighty! That's more than a hundred dollars! What would it cost, I'm wonderin' if the bugger had sleeves." Why do you think it is important to capture this diversity of conversational styles in your poetry? Jacqueline Baldwin: I love dialect and the way that people bring humour into their conversation just through a phrase like " Lard Thunderin, Jesus." It's important to me to write this down because I think it's so funny and so valuable. That's who they are. Karin: In "Are there Any Questions?", you present a male professor/literary critic who insists on identifying male influences in a woman writer's work. The poem suggests that this robs the writer of her own voice. Can you comment on which writers have impressed you? Jacqueline Baldwin: The question is complex because my influences are not always poets. One of my closest friends in New Zealand, a Maori woman after whom I named my daughter, taught me a lot about music, laughter, language and freedom when I was young. She told me there was a word in Maori that described the feeling of a sense of place: a place where one can stand and know it for one's own. It has nothing to do with land ownership as we know it, but has more to do with a certainty about one's place of belonging; it's not just a geographical