12 or 20 (second series) questions with Dawn Macdonald
Dawn Macdonaldlives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she was raised off the grid. Her poetryappears in literary journals like Grain and Nat. Brut, and alsoin speculative publications like Asimov’s Science Fiction and Wizardsin Space. She is the author of Northerny (2024, University ofAlberta Press).
1 - How didyour first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare toyour previous? How does it feel different?
My bookcame out in the midst of chaos. While I was in edits, our landlords decided tosell, and we decided to not get evicted, so we scrambled to buy our house atthe highest possible interest rates; then a tree fell on it. Sewage lines werebeing redone, so we had water outages and boil water advisories, and ourbackyard was excavated into a giant pit (now a giant mud field). My fatherreceived a cancer diagnosis just before Christmas, and while the prognosis wasinitially positive, he died unexpectedly in the week after my first booksigning. I cancelled my planned readings and went into grief. It’s been acouple of months and I’m still in grief. I don’t yet know how these pairedevents will have changed me.
2 - How didyou come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
1. Shortattention span.
2. Obsessedwith language itself: what it does, what it doesn’t.
3. Really badat thinking up plots.
3 - Howlong does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writinginitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear lookingclose to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I’m alwaysor never starting projects – always writing, never sure what is the start ofsomething. Some poems have been pieced together out of fragments of other poemswritten over a span of years. Some were pretty much one and done. I feelaffinity for the Beats with their “first thought, best thought” – but this ismanifestly not always the case – so, it’s all over the place.
4 - Wheredoes a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that endup combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book"from the very beginning?
I’m notgenerally trying to write on any predetermined topic. Writing happens, themescan then be deduced. Recurring obsessions over time may create the illusion ofintention? There’s a convention at the moment that poetry collections have tobe “about” something and I’m still getting my head around that – if I’ve got towrite 40 poems about the same thing, isn’t that an admission of failure?Shouldn’t one good poem do the trick? It doesn’t, of course, so there’s valuein coming at something from many angles, but this is a point of tension for me.
5 - Arepublic readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sortof writer who enjoys doing readings?
All myreadings to date have been online. Covid created some opportunities that way,as I’d never be able to attend magazine launches held in Montréal or Calgary orVancouver, but I can show up on Zoom. I also enjoy when an online journal asksyou to record a reading for them to post as an MP3. But the kind where you goto some sort of party and get up at a microphone? Don’t know – maybe we’ll findout!
6 - Do youhave any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions areyou trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the currentquestions are?
How theheck do words work? Can they work other ways than they usually do? Why would wetend to believe something just because it’s framed as a sentence? What’s theconnection with physical stuff? What’s stuff? Do stories just trick us intothinking things make sense? ... Not sure these are “current questions” asthey’ve been around for a while, but also not sure they’ve been answered.
7 – What doyou see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they evenhave one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Having away with words doesn’t make you extra-good at life. Rhetorical flourish doesnot equate to any special insight, to wisdom. We shouldn’t take beauty fortruth. I see writers and artists as shit-disturbers – throwing ideas out there,for good or for ill. My friend posted one of those lists of “25 Books That WillChange Your Life” and I was like, “I have read most of these and it has been areal rollercoaster.”
8 - Do youfind the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (orboth)?
I workedwith the wonderful Jannie Edwards on my book, Northerny. She wasmarvellously accommodating about my distaste for “Track Changes” – we workedover Zoom with verbal notes. My manuscript was rough. I hadn’t had a clearsense of how a poetry collection is typically structured. By no means did Iagree with or implement all of her suggestions, but we found a productivedialogue, and the book is far more readable thanks to her eye. That said, atthe end of that process, with all its hyperfixation on commas and consistency,I found myself badly blocked in any new writing. I had to set myself exercisesin inconsistency and non-sense-making, to regain freedom, potentiality andflow.
9 - What isthe best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Whateverit is about your work that keeps getting negative feedback, you should try todo that more, because it’s your one hope of originality.” I mean, with somecaveats, obviously, keeping in mind it isn’t especially original to be usingtoo many adverbs, for example – but then, maybe you could construct a poementirely out of adverbs and see what happens? Worth a shot.
10 - Whatkind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How doesa typical day (for you) begin?
Poetry iswonderfully interstitial, fits into those little gaps in the day. I’ve always gota notebook and a pen somewhere nearby, can jot things down over breakfast,fiddle with a few words at the bus stop. I’ve tried “the morning pages” and“the afternoon pages” and “the evening pages” but never found a consistent timethat worked for me. So long as it’s happening, I don’t think it matters when orwhere.
11 - Whenyour writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of abetter word) inspiration?
Periods ofstasis are okay. Some weeks (months, years) are more about taking in.Eventually it will turn and start to flow out again, quite naturally, or ifnot, okay – if you don’t need to, you don’t. Not sure it’s necessary to be takingan aphrodisiac to reignite poetic desire. But, in practice, poems often pop outof snippets of conversation, or the big and small events of daily life, so Ithink just staying alive to the world and its inhabitants.
12 - Whatfragrance reminds you of home?
Woodsmokeand beer.
13 - DavidW. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other formsthat influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Basicallyeverything is an influence. Because my educational background is in science,that’s a thread, and because I live in the North, the wilderness is part ofdaily life. On a syntactical and metrical level, hip hop is an influence – thewordplay, intertextuality, the layering of rhythms. Conversation – andsometimes mishearing someone in conversation, “wouldn’t it be a neat phrasingif they had actually said this ....” Weird phrasings on signage or on products– Nivea sells a body wash with the line, “naturally caring me moments fortouchably smooth skin,” which just has so much to unpack – time as an entityoffering care, care as natural yet purchasable, the purpose of “me moments”being to induce the touch of another. Could I write something as smooth,evocative, dense, and defying of literal sense?
14 - Whatother writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your lifeoutside of your work?
All ofthem? Haha I am on a bit of a mission to read all the books. Accordingly, havebeen obsessed with anthologies. I was very fortunate as a teenager to stumbleacross a second-hand copy of The New American Poetry 1945-1960 (editedby Donald Allen) which absolutely blew my mind – poetry can do this? TheBeats, the New York School – I’d had no idea. Those guys (mostly guys) arestill a big influence. Frank O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems, Kenneth Koch’s humour and play, Ginsberg’s long-line chattiness. Also a big fan of A.R. Ammons, who has a sciencey sort of eye and who wrote a book-length poem aboutgarbage, which speaks to me as an inveterate scrounger and lover of organicmessiness. Alice Notley, who goes big on the page and claims never to revise. Inprose, I have so much respect for Percival Everett, whose most recent novel Jamesis very clever about dialect. I could go on and on.
15 - Whatwould you like to do that you haven't yet done?
To(mis?)-quote P.G. Wodehouse, “It is my fervent hope that the remainder of mydays shall be one round of unending monotony.”
16 - If youcould pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately,what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
My day jobis in Institutional Research, which is a bit like market research and/or dataanalysis. I do a fair bit of survey design, which trains you to write clear andconcise questions that are not too susceptible to divergent interpretations.I’ve done manual transcription of focus group recordings, which is a revelationin terms of learning how people really speak (tip: not in sentences). I do abit of coding in R and SQL, another kind of pithy and precise communicationstyle. But my original career goal was physicist. I wanted to find the GrandUnified Theory. I did my undergraduate in applied mathematics with atheoretical physics concentration, but I’m a physics grad-school dropout, sothat’s the road not taken.
17 - Whatmade you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Not sure Iever thought of it as being opposed to doing anything else! I have to have aday-job, and I definitely have hobbies (mostly knitting and running around inthe woods, not at the same time because you should never run with knittingneedles). A notebook is easy to carry around and writing fits in. Maybe that’sthe answer – because writing is completely portable and fits into very smallspaces and bits of time.
18 - Whatwas the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Book: NaturePoem by Tommy Pico.
Film: JeanneDielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is my favorite film to sayis my favorite film, but, I will probably never watch it again – it’s aone-time experience. Still, pretty great.
19 - Whatare you currently working on?
Ugh. I amvery much in a state of grief. I am writing around that but wouldn’t be able tosay I’m working on anything there. It’s rough and raw and it’s dominating me ina way that’s outside of artistry. We’ll see.
