Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded Territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, Canada). Her work is in Event, Ex-Puritan, Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, and The New Quarterly. She’s won some awards and a gazillion rejections. She keeps writing.
You can read Oracle Deck in the April 2025 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
I am working on a collection of poems about an intense period of caregiving after my daughter had brain surgery and a series of post-operative strokes. I’ve written a lot about this and draw on our everyday routines and interruptions. Every morning, at my daughter’s insistence, we pull oracle, tarot, or goddess cards (she has at least 10 different decks including: Disney Villains, Celebrities, archetypes, animals, and at least three different tarot decks, including a favourite of Margaret Atwood’s (at least that’s where I first heard of it) called This Might Hurt. I was curious if I could try to tell at least some of the sequence of our story using just invented or stolen oracle deck cards. I wanted to keep it simple, like a spread, and only use nouns (as much as possible) getting rid of verbs, adverbs, adjectives etc… It’s working title at the beginning was “bare bones.” I wanted to strip everything down and see if I could create a sequence that held some power with only a few words. I wanted it to feel like someone sitting at a table turning over the cards one by one. That’s why I kept all the “the”s, which also work as breathing spaces.
I also had to figure out if it was okay to leave some things in there that might have meaning only to me or our family but might be powerful enough as an image to hold the mystery. Puff of smoke is one of those images/cards. It works as a mystery image, but also represents moyamoya—the rare disease that my daughter has where the inner carotid artery supplying blood to the brain is constricted or blocked. This leads to the formation of new, tiny blood vessels that try (unsuccessfully) to compensate for the lack of blood flow. Visible on angiograms, they resemble a “puff of smoke” (or “moyamoya” in Japanese).
How do you revise your work?
Let me count the ways! Revision IS the work! At least for me, a poem rarely comes fully formed and I need and love to revise, to tinker. To mess it all up and then find the heart of it again. This used to bother (read scare & terrify!) me. I was always convinced I’d never get the heart of the poem back again, but somehow mostly manage.
I am both methodical and totally wild in the way I approach revision. First though, I print the poem up (2 copies) and keep one on my clipboard and post one on the wall somewhere in my office or sometimes even the laundry room. I also read it aloud over and over again. The clipboard and wall offer me the opportunity to pull it out or stop and read it when I walk past and make any small changes. I find it helpful to stumble across the poem when I’m not thinking about it and see what happens when I read it as if I hadn’t written it. The methodical part of my revision includes sharing it with two trusted poetry groups (I don’t know what I would do without them) to get very skilled outside eyes on them, and then I often use a kind of checklist I’ve compiled from notes from different teachers—Ellen Bass, Dorriane Laux, and Laure-Anne Bosselaar—and go through the poem considering things one at a time (I have these notes on little index cards on a ring and I cycle through). These include things like: title, opening, emotional impulse, syntax, form, space, breath, line, metaphor & image clusters and equivalencies, banalities, etc etc…. I also have some key considerations that change, depending on what skill I’m trying to develop. So, for example, right now I have posted on my bulleting board above my computer: “throw a wrench in it” “really good, really real, a little bit weird” and “follow the path of unknowing.”
What are you working on now?
I am finishing a poetry collection and moving toward submitting. It’s my first time taking on a full writing project! It has various titles but is built around the core set of poems that I submitted for the RBC-PEN Canada Emerging Writers Award. I initially worked with Joan Kwon Glass (who convinced me I had a collection) and am now working with Susan Olding, who is my fantastic mentor through the RBC-PEN Canada award. I am also working on an essay collection and focusing right now on “Hummm” which is an exploration of mammalian evolution, motherhood, and voice with the support of a wonderful group of eco-writers and advocates studying with Katrina Vandenberg through Orion Magazine.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
It seems to be the only kind of writing that I am sure to make some room for in my life right now! Because I can cart it around—poems live on my phone, in a little notebook in my bag, on a clipboard I carry around as I am supporting my daughter (who has a brain injury) in her daily life. But, also, I write every morning from about 6 to 9. Well, that includes a half hour of meditation, a half our of planning the day and the week and keeping everyone’s online calendars in sync, 20 minutes of morning pages …. and then writing! I am not always working on poetry (I am also thick in the middle of prose right now), but I am always reading poetry—either for the feedback groups I am in or the various gazillion poetry books (borrowed, begged, loaned, purchased) that seem to be on every surface of our house. So, I make space for poetry by playing with it every morning in my writing time (writing or editing) and by placing books in my bags and anywhere that I am likely to sit down. I do want to be clear—a writing routine works for me at this particular point in my life, but I would never expect that to work for everyone.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
I am so lucky to belong to two fantastic poetry groups (and 2 amazing prose groups). Each meet twice a month and are feedback only. Both are online and include US and Canadian writers. I love their poems and their incredible feedback. Each member brings a particular skill and point of view and none are prescriptive but broad and generous in their approach to reading and writing poetry. We share a lot of resources (thank you Lynn Tait, a wonderful Canadian poet, for all the word books you pointed me to! –Thesaurus of the Senses, Random House Word Menu, Thesaurus of Words for Writers, Descriptionary, etc.. etc…). Since I really delved back into writing at the beginning of the pandemic, my community has been almost all online (also because of its accessibility, which as a caregiver I so appreciate), I am only now slowly beginning to look at the writing community here in Ottawa. But also, as a almost full-time caregiver (my husband has taken on a lot of the caregiving tasks and we have a team of support people), going out to readings and gatherings is often difficult and I never do well in larger groups … so it is a little bit more intimidating for me and I have to make myself do it.