Poetry Saves Lives: A conversation with Amber Dawn
posted by Dina Del Bucchia | May 9, 2013 | In Featured, Literature

HowPoetrySaved-400How Poetry Saved My Life is a memoir, a call to action and a celebration of poetry. It’s honest and heartbreaking, it’s funny and exciting and it leaves the reader in a loving place. What more could you want?

But enough of this preamble. The goods are in the conversation.

I was lucky enough to be able to spend a lovely morning with Amber Dawn, who is also the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning novel, Sub Rosa. Over pizzelle coffee and tea we discuss sex work, survivorhood, queer grief, small town sexuality, the riot grrrl movement and, of course, poetry.

Was it your intention when you put this memoir into book form for it to be a mix of memoir and poetry? How did it come together?

Here’s my process: I’d write a couple of poems that tackled primarily sex work and some other topics. Then I’d feel terrified and I’d shelve those. That continued for about eight years.

Were you taking a long time between?

Sometimes a year. I would often write pieces to perform at conferences or universities that had programs that were interested in “Ghetto Feminism,” that tackles issues that I was writing about.

I knew I had a book before Sub Rosa. And Arsenal knew as well because Brian Lam is something of an intuitive genius. Sub Rosa was my heart. I really wanted How Poetry Saved My Life to be a book, but I wanted to have my first book be fiction. I felt like it would mark me too much to be a quote unquote confessional author.

Even after all these transitions in your life you still had reservations about the perception?

Yes. Definitely. Brian said to me what about just a book of your collected stories and I asked could there be poetry in there too and he said yes. And I went back to the work and wrote some new pieces and worked with Susan (Safyan, Associate Editor at Arsenal Pulp Press) and put it together in a more cohesive way.

Memoir is extremely popular. Poetry is extremely unpopular. It’s like the prom queen and the skid in the same book. It’s like a John Hughes movie. The poetry is so integrated within the prose sections. It’s not some creative addendum, it’s load bearing poetry. Was your intention to have the poetry do a lot of load bearing work?

For survivors and sex workers, stigmatized people, writing a memoir doesn’t save their life. And memoir of late, I believe is narrow. There’s the inciting moment when the author/character makes their descent into the sex trade, or is sitting in their doctor’s office and are told they have cancer. Whatever that inciting moment is where the identity of stigma attaches itself to the author. They go through the ups and downs, reckoning with their family, to almost destroying themselves and they hit rock bottom, they work back up from and at the end there’s a whole better, wiser person. That’s bullshit. It doesn’t work like that. That’s the movie version.

The poetry isn’t secondary. It doesn’t “interrupt” the prose, it’s woven throughout, it’s part of the structure and the poems inform the pieces before or the pieces after.

[It] shows readers that there are many different ways to tell a story. Poetry is such a wonderful medium to address lesser chosen topics. Poetry was my first love. My oldest writing was poetry.

I think poetry is often associated with young people, or immaturity. You grow up and you’re supposed to stop caring about poetry and ideas. And poetry is about ideas. Like activism, you’re supposed to grow out of it. It’s often dismissed.

In that is a heightened sense of ideas that we care about and as we age we can’t have a heightened sense of our emotions or ideals or values.

People are discouraged from doing that. I hope people read the poetry. Do you worry that people won’t read it?

Gosh no! It never even occurred to me! If they read the introduction it’s a pretty big call to action and it champions poetry in a big way. And the poetry that’s at the beginning of the book, the Outside section, it’s very accessible, there’s not much form. I think a non-poetry reader will still be able to access that.

The book isn’t necessarily chronological, but it is divided into distinct sections. Could you talk about developing that structure?

There’s such a huge divide in my work, outdoor and indoor sex work, and they’re almost completely different vocations and bring up very different sets of problems and relationships.

I think people are often unaware of that.

I think that too, but I’m also surprised by how much people do understand. My friend, the poet Elizabeth Bachinsky, who had seen some versions of the outside poems, told me that when I got an indoor job she was so relieved. At the time no one said that to me. I guess I thought that my friends were oblivious, but they weren’t.

I think people in Vancouver understand that there is a real risk to women on the street. They might be more in tune with why I wanted to start the book outside. Inside work is more clandestine that outdoor work, and it’s this weird almost carnivalesque world.

In the inside section, your humour, or a different kind of voice, is allowed to come out.

I feel like I can make fun of myself in the inside section and the other women I worked with I can parody. But I would never do that about the outside section.

The third section, I still don’t know how I feel about it, I still have a lot of insecurities about it, but it’s me looking back. And it’s about intimacy and how my intimacy was shaped by survivorhood and sex work and a bit about my childhood roots.

I like that the coming of age isn’t at the beginning. Like you were saying earlier about memoir structure, you’re not doing it that way. And you do a really wonderful job of writing about small town Canada without it being this quaint Canadiana that’s very popular and prominent.

But there’s a screech owl!

Yes! So small town life. How was that for you?

In my next book I am happily going back to fiction. And I’m just getting started, so it’s premature to talk about it, but it’s going to be about my hometown. It’s about Fort Erie, which is near Crystal Beach. The amusement park there, after 100 years of operation, closed in 1989, so I’m setting it in 1990. Basically that closure rendered my hometown a ghost town.

Something about small towns that got me thinking that there are sort of two modes of thinking about sex when you’re from a small town. Either it’s great and freeing or it’s oh my God, I cannot-

Get pregnant.

Exactly!

Yeah, you become a young mother and feel trapped.

And also when you’re in a small town you think about escape, and there are many kinds of escape.

Escape and coping become synonymous when you’re in a small town. Coping usually has some kind of silence attached to it as well. One of the reasons I wanted to bring in that story of Fort Erie and my small town was to talk more about love and intimacy. In our formative years when we’re starting to explore things like crazy, in terms of our sexuality, it comes with shame or not communicating. I think I communicated about 1/16 of what my sexual choices were. They just spontaneously happened to me.

That’s very common for girls.

And I think people know that’s common. There’s not a huge leap in my mind between learning as a teenager that you should not talk about the choices you’re making sexually and sex workers not talking about their work. Somewhere women are just asked to not talk about their bodies.

You did bring up a lot about communication or dialogue and how we choose to engage or disengage. You write about being in grad school, or being at work in a massage parlour and studying literature. Could you speak to the idea of people being in a similar situation but having these completely different ideas?

First and foremost I didn’t want to tell anyone else’s story, but I definitely wanted to show that sex workers are very different from one another and queer sex workers are different from one another and sex workers who are survivors are different from one another. We have different coping mechanisms and things that we enjoy. But I wanted to humanize the experience.

Every thing I did from dancing burlesque to reading Sylvia Plath in a massage parlour staff room to writing poems in the UBC classroom that were about sex work, all those things didn’t seem to easily fit into whatever environment I was in.

The more that I reflected on this book and my experiences, the more I realized that we all just don’t fit. And there is either something wrong with us or very wrong with the world and that is the human experience.

It’s how we reconcile or talk about the human experience that’s interesting to me. What I most wanted to do, even more than humanize sex workers, was to explore the idea that everyone has a part of themselves that they don’t feel seem to fit into everyday discourse. But what if it did? What if we just talked about it regardless? And I’ve talked about that and this book is a huge part of that. I’m going to talk about sex work and being a survivor in a literary, non-fiction memoir and bring it to writers’ festivals and encourage people to do the same.

The places where we do that, for me that place would be in queer and gender-variant, activist, artist circles, which I guess is a kind of counter-counter culture. But the places where I can feel I can let a full expression of my being come out. That’s freedom. I don’t feel like I’m going to get freedom through sex work being decriminalized, I feel like I’m going to get freedom and safety through being able to tell my story and people receiving it and vice-versa.

Because that’s creating another level of knowledge. And it’s difficult for people to engage with because it’s not part of their own experience.

hat’s not a skill we’ve been taught.

I was thinking a lot about empathy when I was reading your book.

I would like to believe that people do have empathy, but where they get stuck and frustrated is they don’t know what to. What action is attached to this emotion? For some people it might be a specific activism or to write letters. But with this book I want people to forget about action for a while and just emote. Sit with the feeling.

I’ve started to receive the Q&As that come with reading from this book, and the inevitable questions about decriminalization vs. abolitionism, and I can talk that talk. But part of me thinks this book isn’t about views, it’s about feeling. What actually comes up for us when this is being spoken plainly and creatively in a public forum. Don’t think about what we’re going to do. Just for a minute. Ask yourself, how does this feel?

In terms of empathy this leads into the section on grieving, “How We Bury Our Dead.” You Googling “Queer Funeral Etiquette” and wondering what’s out there.

It’s changing. It certainly helps that there’s more discussion about even marriage equality. I just think the wider the channel of dialogue is when it comes to the really vulnerable feelings, like grieving and death, then there will be more ways to talk about it.

I also think documentary film has done us big favours in terms of grieving with dignity as queer people. And that overlaps with AIDS activism. Documentaries like We Were Here, directed by David Weissman, and United In Anger (about ACT UP). People were grieving and also acting and talking, being very verbal. They were having die-ins as a way to respond to death and grief and the lack of responsibility that the government and medical institutions were taking at that time.

I look at AIDS activism a lot when I look at my own communication skills, my coming together with my community skills. Everything from the AIDS pandemic, to scores of youth suicides really marks our community. And grieving marks our queer experience. It’s part of the human experience.

It marks our whole culture. But it’s something people want to make niche so they don’t have to confront it in the same way. Death and grieving are already difficult and if you’re talking about it within a community you’re not familiar with, it’s harder for people to push that dialogue further.

I also think funerals are a place where birth families and chosen families come together. Sometimes for the first time. How do you navigate that space? It’s way better at a wedding than a funeral. You’re going to have a way better time.

What is the most common question people ask you? Either about your book or about sex work?

Always, it’s how did I get into sex work. Which I don’t answer. I used to give facts and stats instead of answering personally. And I tell them that there is a lot of value attached to how people get into sex work and I’d prefer not to answer.

But I have a new strategy, which is to answer how I exited. It’s a more political thing to talk about. Because I used an exiting program specifically for sex workers called PEERS (Prostitutes Empowerment Education Resources) which was a stronghold in Vancouver and there was one in Victoria. When the Tories came in they cut federal funding. Then when Christy Clark got in the provincial funding was cut. And the city held on for a while but eventually withdrew funding and they had to finally shut down. So sad.

In that environment there was someone to help me with my taxes and I got to consult with a lawyer, to get me above board, and there were counsellors and employment counsellors. Resources for sex workers are being axed in this country and it’s such a critical time.

The weirdest question I ever got asked was in a southern state when I was on the Sex Workers Art Show tour. One of the questions was how we felt about war, were we pacifists (which we all were). The next question was: now that the anti-war movement has won the endorsement of sex workers it feels like you’ll be unstoppable. Do ya’ll think you can you teach the Democrats to be whores for Al-Qaeda?

Wow. Did anyone do or say anything?

I just stood there with my mouth open. I’m from Canada, get me out of here.

Ok. I want to talk about Bikini Kill.

Who doesn’t.

You were obviously inspired by the riot grrrl movement.

There was such energy. Both that and third wave feminism introduced to me that you don’t have to have institutionally sanctioned skills set to make art or to be a speaker. You just need to start making or saying stuff.

And I just feel a lot of gratitude that I was around to catch that message. I keep it near and dear forever.

I saw them open for Sonic Youth. Wooo! I was so close to Buffalo and Toronto. I could literally walk over the bridge to shows in Buffalo.

The Kathleen Hanna energy is in this book. There’s a whole poem about that references it too, “Bikini Kill Lyrics.”

That was the newest piece that I wrote, along with the three postcards that end the book. Who ends their memoir with erotica? I do.

It’s lovely.

We learn so much about ourselves through our sexual experiences.

***

How Poetry Saved My Life is available now from Arsenal Pulp Press. To find out more about Amber Dawn go to her fancy website here.
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About The Author
Dina Del Bucchia

Dina’s a graduate of the UBC MFA program in Creative Writing. She is a host and coordinator of the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series and many other literary events. Her writing has appeared in Matrix, Event, Poetry is Dead, The Great Divide and The Acrobat. Her first book of poetry is Coping With Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks, 2013). She lives in Vancouver.