Heather Birrell is the author of the Gerald Lampert award-winning poetry collection, Float and Scurry, and two story collections, Mad Hope (a Globe and Mail top fiction pick for 2012) and I know you are but what am I? The Toronto Review of Books called Mad Hope “completely enthralling, and profoundly grounded in an empathy for the traumas and moments of relief of simply being human.” She lives in Toronto with her mother, partner, two daughters, and a Whoodle named Angus. www.heatherbirrell.com
You can read Oh, Sunday Evenings in the January 2024 issue.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Lately my poems have been beginning in the words of other poets-on-the-page, given voice by myself and other in-person-poets… Stuart Ross, a wonderful poet and mentor-friend, first introduced me to an exercise called River of Words, where a book or books by published poets are passed around in a circle and snippets are read aloud. Those people in the circle who are not reading aloud are invited to record and/or to use the words they hear as jumping off points for their own fragmented or flowing thoughts. More recently, I have been doing this exercise with the artist and poet Rami Schandall. I find writing really hard. I am easily censored or stymied by my own hang-ups, perfectionism, and endless to-do lists. This method gives me permission to get lost in waves of other people’s words, and it lets me write around things I might not be able to address head on.
Are there other art forms that inspire your poetry?
Honestly? I suppose they are not conventional art forms, but lately teaching and parenting have been great sources of both complicated joy and deep frustration – and have presented a myriad of intellectual and emotional puzzles that drive me to poetry because it seems to be one of the only written forms out there that allows for the jaggedyness, the airiness, the patience and rage, the feeling of odd, exhilarating goddamn im/possibility that these ventures evoke in me. I want to write poems that get at the everydayness of these things – as well as their exaltedness!
There are two books (not poetry, but poetry-adjacent) that I have read recently that have supported and challenged me in my parenting/teaching ventures. How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell and Teaching Where You Are: Weaving Indigenous and Slow Principles and Pedagogies by Shannon Leddy and Lorrie Miller. Highly recommended.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine? AND Have you ever received advice (or has there been something you learned on your own) about writing or revising poems that has made you a better poet? What was it?
I wrote myself a little manifesto on this subject when I was feeling particularly frustrated by what felt like a constant barrage of messages attempting to shoehorn art into commerce.
You don’t always have to be writing to be a writer. There are tons of blogs and coaches and Instagram reels out there that will dictate word or page quotas, a set time to write (usually 5 am), a rigid routine, a detailed plan or strategy. This advice seems designed to make people (usually women) who work for a living and/or take care of other people feel like shit. Fuck that. Fuck productivity. Strategies are for sports teams and armies. You are a writer if you think about your poem or essay or novel on the subway, go for a walk without your phone, spend time and energy (and money) on therapy that works for you, care for your people (and plants and creatures) without falling into martyrdom, give your attention freely to the world around you, take naps, have the hard, sad, joyful conversations on couches or in cafes. Art shouldn’t cleave to the demands of capitalism, and we are undermining ourselves and the process when we force it to. Hold the world, as much as you can, close to you, scan the horizon, then sink deep into dream time. This is the work, the play, and the purpose.
What are you working on now?
Short Answer: a novel, stories, some might-be-poems, might-be-essays….
Long Answer: I am constantly wrestling with this idea of artistic expression as a product (boo!) while trying to afford myself the structure and tools to shape thought and sensation into forms that might reach and move other humans. I find it hard to talk about my work when it is in progress – not sure if this is superstition or just how my process works. I think something in me wants to maintain the intimacy of pre-publication creation for as long as possible. Sometimes I think this guardedness is narcissistic and unnecessarily secretive; at other times I think it is a noble resistance to any impulse towards branding or marketing. I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.