Experientially Speaking

Hey all,

I'm sitting here, having freshly showered and changed into my reading frock, having succumbed to the interweb's fiendish lure.

I should be putting the butter tarts Gerry Hill left in the Wallace Stegner freezer in the oven and pulling out the broccoli & grape salad I made earlier and testing the seasoning - all in service of tonight's end-of-term reading - but I wanted to share something first.

One of the pleasures of giving into the interweb's wiles is that sometimes lovely things like the summer issue of the Sage Hill Writing Experience's alumni newsletter Experientially Speaking arrive.

I'm profiled in this latest issue, which is sort of fun, and involved answering a series of questions via email a month or so ago and trying not to sound harried/boastful/stupid.

For those of you not SH alumni, I thought I'd post the text here...


(Also: Yay! Fun!)


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My favourite place to write is:

My dining room table. My upstairs office. The couch. The passenger seat of the
car.

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I can’t write without:

Tea, hot and sweet and as black as my heart.

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The writer I admire most is:

Robert Kroetsch. He’s smart and funny and dirty and I like how he strings both
his poetry and his fiction together.

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That last book I read was:

Girls Fall Down (Coach House) by Maggie Helwig. I’ve also got a two-
volume 1929 biography of Thomas Edison that I’m referring to con-
stantly these days, but that’s because I’m working on a cycle of poems
about Edison and his eldest daughter Dot.

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The last thing I wrote was:

A poem called ‘How to Write a Poem' from an ever-growing series
based on articles sourced from the wikiHow widget.

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The thing I remember most about Sage Hill is:

My mentor Daphne Marlatt in the Poetry Colloquium last summer. I’d
probably be remiss if I didn’t thank her, as she gave the two chapbook
manuscripts I wound up publishing this spring a final thorough shake.

And, of course, the galloping deer that almost bowled me over one
morning.