Is writing the most important thing in my life? Mm. No, but writing poetry and talking about it is a way to capture the things that are important, and to share them. It’s a neutral space where I give over to “you” the important pieces of “me,” so that “we” can know them, perhaps challenge them, possibly welcome them. Writing gives everyone an equal opportunity to express what they really believe and want the world to know. The more I write, the more I love to write.
I did not always write. I took it up in the 1980s at the University of Manitoba where I encountered some great local poets, but then let it recede for a number of decades as my life went in different directions. I focussed on work, worried about family, experienced all sorts of successes and failures. When I came back to writing I suddenly found I had much to say, and of course poetry always felt like the best space to articulate things.
Publications are currently few, though I have quite a number of poems that want to be read. I always like to point people to my article on graffiti. Researching graffiti in the field gave me a profound sense of what writing is in the first place: an intersection between a subject and the apparatus of power and authority where the space (often a writing surface) is a contested resource. All writing, to me, is as much political as it can be personal. The article itself is a little more mundane: “A Wilderness of Walls: Graffiti in Winnipeg,” originally published in Canadian Dimension in 1999. I was also shortlisted for the CBC Literary Competition in 2003, and have had poems in the quint: an interdisciplinary quarterly from the north, and won a prize in the West Central Street’s poetry competition.