Tazi Rodrigues is a writer and aquatic biologist from Winnipeg, currently living on the unceded land of the Anishinaabe Algonquin Nation (Ottawa, ON). She won the 2024 Diana Brebner Prize and second place in the 2023 Kloppenburg Hybrid Grain Contest, and other writing has recently appeared in CV2 and The Malahat Review.
You can read maureen in the January 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?
After a summer job as an assistant lighthouse keeper in 2018, I wrote a chapbook-worth of poems about the island where I had worked as a way to “shelve” the experience. What I didn’t realise at the time, though, was that there were many stories from that summer – mine and those I learned from the few other staff and visitors – that I wouldn’t have the space or growth to unpack until years later, so every once in a while a new poem pops up. Most of the story of this one is in the piece itself, on an island down the archipelago from where I stayed that summer but which I visited for a day to provide tours. It’s strange to inhabit someone else’s home so briefly, yet be in the position of explaining it to other guests. My other distinct memory of that day is of a forest ecologist who came on a tour and gave me one back, leaning into the mosses and lichens we passed as we wove around the washing machines and spectacle of an old, odd Coast Guard house.
As a poet, what does creative success or achievement look like for you?
I am very happy when I figure something out. In writing “maureen,” for example, I was able to store my wandering memories of her island in concepts of mythology and haunting, which – maybe oddly, for haunting – concretized something I’d been searching for. When I work on longer pieces, it is so satisfying when the threads come together, often uncovering something for me in the process.
I’m also very grateful for all the magazine editors who have taken on my work, and after the internal success of a poem clicking on the page, I hope that my writing is resonating with people beyond myself. If I can nudge someone towards feeling how they feel when they walk in a forest or dip in a lake, that would be pretty amazing.
What are you working on now?
One of my hopes for this calendar year is to write some prose. From ages four to fifteen, I was an avid fiction writer, and then I stopped writing prose outside of academia for several years. More recently I have been experimenting with essays and inching my way back to fiction. I recently bought a notebook for the purpose of spending less time in front of screens, which has had the added, unexpected benefit of generating nostalgia for those years that I spent writing in every spare moment at school, spurring more recent prose. I’m also wrapping up a poetry project on sound and ecology, neither of which are topics that I think will readily disappear from my work, but finishing this manuscript coincides with shifts in my work as a biologist, which feels right.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
This is a bit out of the box, but I think museum curation is likely an art form, and it both inspires and informs my poetry. In 2023, I read a poem about the fish collection of the Royal Ontario Museum at a launch for Canthius and someone asked me how museums and physical objects inform my creative practice. At that point, I hadn’t considered it yet, but that question really stuck with me and made me realise that they are a really engaging place for me to think. Also, I now live in the same neighbourhood as the Canadian Museum of Nature, which makes thinking about museums more immediate in my life than it was during lockdowns. I have no idea what goes through a curator’s mind, but maybe it’s something like poetry in the laying of items and concepts close to one another.
How do you make space for poetry in your daily routine?
I wonder this too! After being in school for the better part of twenty years (counting from nursery), I’m starting to settle into an office job now that I’ve been there for over a year, but I’m still experimenting. Right now, for example, I’m trying to write in a café after work on a Friday, which so far seems more conducive to answering these questions than drafting new poems – but I’m not deep enough into the evening to decide that’s true forever. While being a student and working non-office jobs didn’t necessarily afford me more time, there is a certain constraint to my new routine that I’m still figuring out with respect to poetry. However, poetry will always figure out how to wriggle into my life. Currently there are books and lit mags all over my home, which is useful for slotting poems into however much time and energy I have and less useful for jumping cats looking for somewhere to land. I’m also a regular listener of a few writing podcasts, typically on my walks to and from work or while doing chores – especially Page Fright and Poetry Off the Shelf. I write two poems or fewer a month, typically, which isn’t many, but is enough to keep me fulfilled while keeping time for all the other parts of my life that are fulfilling.
Do you belong to a writer’s group? If not, where do you find poetry community and feedback?
This past summer, I took an online workshop with Ariel Gordon on writing about place, at the end of which she recommended that the participants keep working together. Right now, we’re a writing group of four, each in a different physical landscape and with a different balance of poetry/fiction/creative non-fiction in our writing practices. The initial draw of writing about place seems to hold us together across these differences, even if from month to month our pieces vary in how directly they approach this. We meet monthly, virtually, and have a reasonably organized schedule that keeps us in touch with comments on drafts between gatherings. I have also started to talk to people at Ottawa readings instead of flitting around like a strange, invisible moth, and look forward to continuing to build my poetry community here!