This month PRISM international is dedicated to looking at Creative Non-fiction as a genre. So, even though your newest book, Where the words end and my body begins, is a (beautiful) book of poetry, I’m curious to hear about how you work with and define Creative Non-fiction. Your previous book, How Poetry Saved My Life, is a mix of prose and poetry, and all memoir. Even with the blending in of poetry, does that work feel like Creative Non-fiction to you?
I can’t claim to know what Creative Non-fiction feels like. When I think of the memoirs that have impacted me most as a reader—Bone Black by bell hooks, The Women Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston, Paula by Isabella Allende, I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Bagourti, Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo, Wild by Cheryl Strayed—when I reflect on these books I am aware that I haven’t yet come close to knowing what it looks like to truly write a work of Creative Non-fiction, or what Non-fiction can do as a craft.
I took a decade to write How Poetry Saved My Life, with each section prompted by a specific call or opportunity—an invitation to speak at a conference or submit to a themed anthology. I would have offered poems if I could. But when I’m trying to convey to listeners or readers the social justice aspects of sex work, I’ve found that poetry doesn’t quite make the message accessible and poignant in the way that Non-fiction does. Accessibility and clarity is largely why I write Creative Non-fiction. In the poetry found in my memoir, I consider the places where I got to think about what’s true for me, what feels authentic for me. I needed those poems to help me bind the prose together, and also to help me reflect on what a tremendous task it is to tell one’s story, and to invite the reader into that telling in the way that Non-fiction does.
The place where I began to write is the Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood of Indigenous feminism and Elders, and also a place where colonial violence is enacted every day. And it’s a neighbourhood of poetry—Thursday’s Writing Collective, the annual Heart of the City Festival, Megaphone Magazine. Here I want to mention activist and poet Bud Osborn—rest in power.
There are many ways to appreciate the diverse and robust poetry of the Downtown Eastside. For now, I’ll say that here poetry is used as a means to resist erasure. It’s poetry of memory, visibility and dignity in survival. I learned and continue to learn a lot about speaking my truth living in the Downtown Eastside—and certainly not only “my individual truth”—I learned to constantly be acknowledging where any truth, knowledge or skill I have has come from. I tried to honour quite a few teachers and mentors in Where the words end and my body begins. This does feel somehow different from what I’ve learned about Non-fiction writing, which was very much focused on craft. I learned writing as justice first and craft second. I suppose I am now in the process of figuring out how the two come together.
Because of the way you’ve spoken and written about your books, it feels safe to say that there’s a lot of your real life—not only truth, though there’s also a lot of that—in your work. How did the publication of How Poetry Saved My Life affect you in terms of keeping your life and your work separate? Do you feel like people come to your poetry and to your newer book, Where the words end and my body begins, expecting that they know something about you personally and your real life?
I’ve been asked a similar question a few times and I always try to come up with something wise and heartening to say. The truth is that I don’t have a tried and true method for keeping work and life separate. Those things don’t have a lot of separation for me. In terms of my memoir, it’s not exactly the lack of privacy that concerns me. It’s the beliefs that we all hold about survivors and trauma narratives that concern me. I receive an overwhelming amount of responses (through email, social media and verbal communication) to my memoir. Again and again, these responses reveal how many of us have been told there is something untrue or flawed with the ways we cope, the ways we love, the ways we heal, and the ways we gather, what we say, and when we keep silent, and how we simply exist. Can poetry solve this? I believe it can. Or at least I believe I have to try. The other possibilities are not ones I can afford to entertain. I think as writers we have to do what is not easy. So, my writing must counterwork against this pervasive idea that there is something wrong with us. I’m determined and I also think that’s a big task—a lifelong task.
In Where the words end and my body begins, the poems that you chose (or that chose you) to gloss feel deeply important to the speaker because of their feminism, their queerness, their fierce commitment to survival. You mention too in the introduction that the first glosas that called to you, which were from P.K. Page’s Hologram, contained a “bloodline of language and memory and feeling.” I’m curious about how story—whether it’s factually true or not—can become a kind of truth to hold on to and can connect us to other people across time and space. Do you feel like “truth” and “Non-fiction” is the same thing? Or would you define those differently?
I usually lead with a credo: what do I actually want to accomplish with what I’m about to write? And, so, “What do I want?” is my truth. I’ve already hit it once, I can answer that question. But I might not hit it right away. If my first answer is, “I want to write about trauma and healing,” that’s not actually the ultimate answer. The ultimate answer is a few questions further—why do I want to write about trauma and healing? Because I want to fight stigma and I want to add to the texts that exist that other survivors will read and hopefully feel seen within. So why do I want to do that? Well, there’s still another answer, which is actually that I’m always looking for community; I’m looking to belong to something bigger than my own lived experience. And that’s when I feel emotional—I’m looking to belong. There’s my final answer. There’s the truth. So then I sat down and wrote a book of glosa poems because there is no other form that I currently have knowledge of that honours the connectivity between poets. So truth is, “What do I want to achieve?” Why am I really doing this? I strongly encourage all writers to ask themselves “why am I doing this?” on a regular basis.
Esther McPhee is a writer and facilitator, who co-organizes a queer reading series called REVERB. They read a lot of kids books and put stuff up online at esthermcphee.com.