~ media likes to make these romantic figures out of writers. I suppose I shouldn’t resist it so much. I did for years about being a ‘witch’. Maybe I should say sure I am and acknowl- edge it, but the truth is I don’t really know who I am, or what I am. I just try to get through every day. My work is-a stronger force than I am as a person. By the time a book comes out, you have already shed that skin. My new poems are a progression from Cocktails at the Mausoleum. My work changes all the time, but I don’t get the impression that reviewers see that. SL: Do you feel you go through a metamorphosis every 3 or 4 years? SM: Yes, Id say every 4 years I do change my life quite radically. I wonder if I’m up for a change right now. The last years have been so blurry. The 5 years I’ve lived here and wrote the Charcoal Burners was a fairly solid chunk of time. And then from 1980 to 1985 I was living in South America and then back east for 2 years. I feel misplaced. It must be inevitable what’s happening. (Susan must move from her Vancouver Island home.) I can’t believe it. I think I’ve put enough protective spells around the place it may be keeping people away. I’m not doing voodoo or anything, but people-come in and sense there is something here they wouldn’t want to take away from. SL: This is your space. SM: Yes. No-one could move in happily into this space. [t would be very hard, although that may just be because I love it. SL: Your new book, Blowdown Covert, you have been working on for 6 years now. How do you cope with great changes in your life, or does the book act like a stabilizing force. SM: | suppose it did. Right now because I’m not writing I'm really lost. I was just reading something by John Fowles about being in between books and you feel dead, but how you have to have that period to lie fallow. I’m very bad at lying fallow. I don’t even feel like a writer anymore because it has been 3 or 4 months. I finished my novel in March, and I haven’t started anything since. I know these are times when I’m accumulating: you can’t just keep pro- ducing. After I finished my novel I went through a real burnout. I edited Stephen’s book; I had been working on mine and his at the same time. And then I had not an ounce of anything to put into anymore work. SL: How did you come to edit Stephen Reid’s book? SM: Well, I was writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo from September ’83 to May ’85. It was in the fall of 84 a criminologist called Fred Desroches gave me a 90 page manuscript to read from an inmate at Millhaven Penitentiary. He asked me to comment on it because he didn’t know anything about creative writing. About a week later I got down to reading it, and it was just the best thing I had read since starting the job. I immediately wrote and told him in about 5 pages, and sent it to my publisher, McClel- land and Stewart, who offered him a contract for the 90 pages. And then at some point, I think half way down the first page, I fell in love with him. Many people have asked me about this. The Fifth Estate came out to do an interview and asked, “How could you fall in love on the first page of a book?” Well, given my situation, I was living in this snow drift in Kitchener, cut off from everything I know, and feel- ing pretty lonely with no energy in my life, it wasn’t so un- usual. I mean, people in Kitchener think it is really daring if you run a yellow light. That is about as passionate as they get. And here I get this incredible story about these bank robbers. I had so much adrenalin running through my sys- tem — it woke me up. I guess love for me is energy., So I started writing Stephen love letters. We finally met in De- cember. It was really embarrassing. I couldn’t even look at him. I felt so stupid after I had proclaimed my love, al- though it was fairly mutual. I wonder how we both knew it was. We didn’t seem to question it. SL:.His book is coming out in October? SM: Yes. Jackrabbit Parole, it is called. SL: Is your book also coming out then? SM: No, it is coming out next fall. I have yet to do a major edit on it. SL: Is this book similar to The Charcoal Burners or is it a departure? SM: It is a departure. It is more of a comedy than The Char- coal Burners. But pretty well anything would be a comedy after The Charcoal Burners , althought I think the first half was quite black humour. But I haven’t been near it for so long I don’t even know what the book is like anymore. When I finish a book it is like I never wrote it. I can’t re- member being in that world. SL: Is ‘that world’ a very magical place? SM: It can be. Sometimes it is awful. Getting into it is hard and then leaving it is hard. SL: A lot of your poetry has the influence of the Northwest Coast Indians. You wrote a series of poems for the Queen Charlotte Islands. Did you write them having a definite in- tention to educate or provoke people? SM; No, I’m not really a very political person. there are things I believe in, but there are not very many causes. Ob- viously, I'd like the islands saved. But I guess I’m too cyni- cal. I just don’t believe anything gets saved. I mean, those people have been fighting for 15 years and those islands are still being logged. They have got a lot of attention but the government still goes says go ahead and log. ‘We are all doomed!’ (She laughs.) That is my general feeling. We are fighting against people who are getting $60,000.00 or more a year to do their job. Poetry is my quiet way of registering my own personal protest. But I don’t think in our culture poetry is paid enough attention to, to be listened to in any consequential way. The fact that we don’t ban books here — only in countries where they think writers are really frightening or can influence people are books banned. Poets don’t have their hands chopped off here because nobody figures what they say is going to influence anyone. It is nice to live in a country where you can write what you want but on the other hand, you could say anything and I don’t know how much of a difference it would make, and that is a strange position to be in. SL: You don’t need to have a function or purpose for your work? SM: Again, that is something I don’t think about. It is so hard to write a poem. If I ever write another poem it will be a miracle, that is how I think between each poem. SL: In your first book of poems, Songs of a Sea Witch, you write: “In the north / a woman can learn / to live with too much sadness. / Finding anything could be hard.” Is this about yourself? SM: I suppose so. I don’t know if I had any experience at that time with the north. I just had this romantic vision of it. SL: Do you live with too much sadness? SM: A lot of the time, yes. The other day I realized I must be the most unrelaxed person on the earth. I started taking these “oil of evening of primrose” capsules that somehow relaxed me, and I thought maybe some people are this calm all the time. I’ve always had this sense of panic in me. I haven’t had it for about a week now, but I also:don’t have any poems. So I wonder how related to panic the writing of poetry is. I’m always looking at the clock. Oh I should be here. I’m late for this. I have a total preoccupation with something that is about to happen, and when it does, it doesn’t really matter if I walk more slowly to the bank or run. I get frantic. And I realize a lot of people aren’t like this and I can’t understand it. I’ve had this inkling this week be- cause I’ve been feeling so calm that maybe it is possible to feel calm, but I’ve never lived with this feeling. When someone says relax I just feel violent! (She laughs). August 1986 Note: Susan Musgrave married Stephen Reid on October 12th this year. Both BCTV and The Fifth Estate covered the wedding. “It was more real than the real thing” . The Fifth Estate programme will be aired sometime in November. Susan will also have an article “My Wedding” in an up- coming issue of Vancouver Magazine. — October 24, 1986 Along the river trees are stranded bare as witches and dark as the woman who never learned to love one man. (In the north a woman can learn to live with too much sadness. Finding anything could be hard.) From “At Nootka Sound” Songs of the Sea Witch Sandra Lockwood is a 2nd year Inter-disiplinary student at the Emily Carr College of Art and Design and a frequent contributor to The Planet of the Arts. PLAWET 6€ THE ARTS 13 SCS SS RSS Cee SSCS SESS TESTE SS ESR FROM THE SKETCHBOOK OF PRED PETER DEN NNNAQAANNRRNNAAAAAAAAAANAAAANANANANAAAAAAAAAARAAAAAAAAAARARAAAAAAARAAAAAAARAAA