Interview With An Author Featuring Ruth Panofsky

Today I have the great pleasure of chatting with Ruth Panofsky.

Ruth Panofsky is the author of three books of poetry: Lifeline (2001); Laike and Nahum: A Poem in Two Voices (2007), which won the Helen and Stan Vine Canadian Jewish Book Award; and Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems (forthcoming May 2020), which received a Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award. You can read her personal essay, “Character Study,” in the March 2020 issue of the Literary Review of Canada here: https://bit.ly/3duQNKe

I must say, I love it when literary worlds collide and I am currently reading (and loving) The Dowager Empress: Poems by Adele Wiseman edited by Elizabeth Greene and the intersection and creative camaraderie between Adele Wiseman, Elizabeth Greene and Ruth Panofsky is both fascinating and inspiring.

Thank you for chatting with me today, Ruth! Tell us a bit about you, where were you born? Where did you grow up?
I was born in Montreal and grew up in Chomedey, Laval, a suburb just north of the city.

How would you describe yourself, in five words or less?
Contemplative, conscientious, introverted, creative, and driven.

How did you come up with the concept and characters for Radiant Shards:Hoda's North End Poems?
Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems (forthcoming this May with Inanna Publications) writes back to Adele Wiseman’s 1974 novel Crackpot, which I first read as a graduate student in the early 1990s. Wiseman’s protagonist is Hoda, an obese Jewish sex worker who services the boys and men of North End Winnipeg during the middle years of the twentieth century. Hoda’s remarkable story of resilience and vulnerability, which occupied my imagination for years, is told via third-person narration. My book of poems stays true to the narrative arc of Wiseman’s novel, but it imagines a first-person lyric voice for Hoda. Radiant Shards also incorporates historical images of North End Winnipeg, which are held at the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada. So my work is a hybrid of the fictional, the real, and now the poetic.

Do you have any “side stories” about the main character in Radiant Shards?
Readers may be interested to learn that Wiseman claimed to have based her heroine on an actual figure of North End Winnipeg, once home to the city’s red light district. A mere glimpse of a large woman on a street corner gave rise to one of most enduring fictional characters. This layering of fact and fiction underwrites my own treatment of Hoda.

Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise? Why?
I need complete silence to write. I am susceptible to distraction, so silence helps me focus. I marvel at people who can tune out the world and write wherever they find themselves.

Pen or typewriter or computer?
For me, poems begin as longhand drafts and only later, after several revisions, do I transfer a poem to the computer screen. That’s where I undertake the serious work of bringing about a final draft.

Thank you, Ruth, for joining me today and I very much look forward to reading Radiant Shards: Hoda’s North End Poems.