Poetry Quebec: Are you a native Quebecer? If not, where are you originally from? Why did you come to Quebec?
Stephanie Bolster: I was born in Vancouver, grew up in Burnaby, BC, and moved to Montreal when I was hired by Concordia's Department of English.
PQ: When and how did you encounter your 1st Quebec poem?
SB: I don't tend to think in terms of the provincial origins of poems and especially didn't do so when I first began reading poetry. I suspect, though, that my first Quebec poem would have been one by Leonard Cohen, read in an introductory Canadian Literature course as an undergrad at UBC.
PQ: When and how did you first become interested in poetry?
SB: Like many kids, I remember writing haiku in grade two; unlike most, I enjoyed the experience. As a child, I wanted to write children's books and most of what I read was prose. It was only when I was fifteen or sixteen that poetry emerged as a focus for me.
PQ: What is your working definition of a poem?
SB: I don't really have one, though as a teacher I like to begin my classes with the question of defining poetry, because it reveals a lot about the students' preconceptions. I'm more interested in pushing beyond implicit boundaries than in defining them. Increasingly, I'm drawn to work that disregards genre.
PQ: Do you have a writing ritual? If so, provide details.
SB: I try to write early in the day, before e-mail and the To Do list take over, but in practice, it's hard to stick to those rules. I write on the computer -- anything written on paper feels provisional for me -- and need to feel myself alone to write well, even if there are other people around. I don't listen to music, though I do usually have a bunch of books lying around -- reference books pertaining to what I'm writing about, art books, books of poetry -- and increasingly Googling comes into my writing process. This lets the poems be more digressive and fact-rich though it also wastes a lot of time.
PQ: What is your approach to writing of poems: inspiration driven, structural, social, thematic, other?
SB: Once I find a subject, a concept, I tend to write around it for quite a long time -- i.e., a long poem, a series of poems, or a whole manuscript -- and having an ongoing subject helps me to sit down to write even if I'm not feeling inspired. That said, occasional poems do simply arise sometimes and I try to make way for them even if I should be doing something else.
PQ: Do you think that being a minority in Quebec (ie. English-speaking) affects your writing? If so, how?
SB: As a poet, I'm used to being on the margins, so living in Quebec grants a kind of anonymity that can be conducive to writing. I also appreciate the ways in which understanding French expands my understanding of the world -- when I've been speaking or listening to French a great deal, I think differently -- and also the ways in which my lack of complete fluency enables me to turn off francophone conversations in public places, allowing me to be alone with my thoughts while in a crowd, hearing tantalizing tidbits but not being tempted to eavesdrop.
PQ: Do you think that writing in English in Quebec is a political act? Why or why not?
SB: No. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I'd grown up here, but because there is a large anglophone readership in Canada outside of Quebec, and a readership -- limited but healthy -- here, I don't feel I'm going out on a limb by writing in English. For me to write in French would be a political act.
PQ: Why do you write?
SB: It's how I think, how I feel, how I understand the world.
PQ: Who is your audience?
SB: Myself, first of all. After that, like-minded people. And, ranging farther, unlike-minded people who might, through reading my work, come to a new understanding of the world and/or themselves.
PQ: Do you think there is an audience, outside of friends or other poets, for poetry?
Of course. It's a small one, but it's there, and in some countries it's quite significant. I've met people who are devout poetry readers but don't write.
 |
| Stephanie Bolster |
PQ: Does your day job impact on your writing? How?
SB: On a practical level, having a day job takes time, which means that there's less time to write. But I'm fortunate enough to have a day job that lets me think about writing, specifically about poetry, much of the time. Teaching makes me a better reader of poetry; it hones my editorial sense, makes me less willing to accept -- as a writer and as a reader -- easy or rote formulations. Ultimately, that makes me a better writer, too, though because it makes me tougher on myself, it can feel like an obstacle at times.
PQ: How many drafts (beer too) do you usually go through before you are satisfied/finished with a poem?
SB: This varies enormously. Some poems (though a very few) remain relatively unchanged from their initial drafts. Most, though, go through . . . 5? 10? 15 drafts? What is a draft? I think of the process more in terms of time, and many of my poems take several years before they find their "final" form, by which I mean the form on which I settle, before moving on.
PQ: Do you write with the intention of “growing a manuscript” or do you work on individual poems that are later collected into a book?
SB: I need to have a concept before I begin to think of poems as a book. That concept is rarely clear at the outset, but without it, I do feel as if I'm spinning my wheels. A poem that doesn't tie in to anything else, though it may be published in a journal, doesn't feel quite worthy for me. I'm at my best when working in longer poems or series.
PQ: What is the toughest part of writing for you?
SB: Making peace with myself, with the fact that writing is essential but that other things also need to be done. Finding a balance is difficult. If I try to clear the decks (like answering these interview questions!) before I begin writing, I'll never begin writing; there's always something To Do. On the other hand, if I cloister myself, things that need to get done don't get done, people around me get frustrated, and I cheat myself out of the life experiences that make me a richer person, which in turn make me a richer poet.
PQ: What is your idea of a muse?
SB: A photograph, a painting, a line of poetry or music, a scene, a fascinating fact, that makes me pull out paper and a pen.
PQ: Do you have a favourite time and place to write?
SB: At the beginning or at the end of the day, in my office at home, beside the window.
PQ: Do you like to travel? Is travel important to your writing? Explain.
SB: I love to travel. It unsettles me, and this ultimately makes for good writing. I have to be wary, though, of relying upon the exoticism of travel or the gap between expectation and reality, about which I tend to write frequently. I rarely write much while travelling; it's often not until years after a trip that it will manifest itself in poems.
PQ: Do you have a favourite Quebec poet? If yes who and why?
Too many to mention.
PQ: Do you write about Quebec?
SB: Not consciously; to do so would be to be more socially motivated than I am as a writer at this point. I'm more interested in psychology and aesthetics than in politics or sociology. I've written about the paintings of Jean Paul Lemieux and about my move here from B.C., but now that this place is home, I'm less aware of it, and when I am, that awareness hasn't, so far, translated into poems. I'm more interested in Montreal as a city than I am in Quebec as a province. I'd like to write more about the roughness of the city; the fact that the city is not constantly remaking itself to the extent that Vancouver and Toronto are comforts and inspires me, because it implies a respect for history and leaves space for individual identities to assert themselves.
