Wendy McGrath took
the time to entertain a few questions ahead of her visit. Conversation
starters, if you will.
Ore:
Your
remarkably long and productive collaboration with internationally renowned
printmaker Walter Jule has led to exhibitions and to your latest poetry
collection A Revision of Forward. In
the Afterword, Jule explains how a statement by you inspired the creation of a
new course titled “Word and Image” in the printmaking curriculum at the
University of Alberta. I was particularly taken with how he captures the
experience of reading your work: “As I became more familiar with McGrath’s
writing I was struck by references to memory (cerebral and haptic) of the
physical world: particular shapes, colours, smells and an overarching sense of
what I can only call the circularity of time, an intuition that past and
present can be simultaneous without destroying the temporal sequence of before
and after.” The repetition of “becomes
something else” at the end of each stanza of “Sub Terra,” a poem of great subtlety
that deals on the surface with a flooding basement, is an outstanding example of
the way design and rhythm contribute to this striking effect. Can you tell us a
bit about your creative process? Or let me put the final line of that poem to
you: “Wendy, why is it with you everything always becomes something else?”
Wendy McGrath:
I’d describe my
creative process as multi-layered. With “A Revision of Forward” the creative
process was lengthy. Walter Jule and I started a collaborative
poetry-printmaking project some 12 years ago, so those initial poems I wrote
inspired by ethereal artist’s proofs on ephemeral but tough Japanese gampi paper, and those first prints have
evolved over time and over the collaboration into the eponymous long poem in
the collection. Some of the other poems in “A Revision of Forward” have
provided Walter with inspiration for additional prints. It’s interesting, too,
because Walter has incorporated 3-D elements into some of the prints—so the
project seems to have a life of its own. Generally speaking, though, my writing
is triggered by a sensory experience, which could be anything, really, and then
I might look for connections and links and listen for what I’m being told to do
with this experience. The creative process for me is about transformation,
transmutation, and transubstantiation—“everything always becomes something
else.”
Ore:
Compact and
complex, your novels bring alive the workings of perception, memory and imagination
during the formative years. Partway through Santa
Rosa, the five-year-old protagonist (who, we learn earlier, is learning to
read and write while navigating her parents’ disintegrating relationship),
observes the luncheonette: “Red and white tile floors like teeth or piano keys
from a piano and the keys could be any colour she chose. The music would be
hers and would taste the colour of the keys. The sound: the colour. Would red
keys really make the music sound different? She could taste each letter their
sound their music.” In North East she
tastes colours a number of times. Intrigued, I looked up synesthesia, thought
about sense impression and creative expression, reviewed the normal cognitive
development of a child, but none of this explains how to make the sensory
experience and thoughts of a five-year-old character believable on the page. Can
you give us some insight into how you achieved this?
Wendy McGrath:
The narrator in both Santa Rosa and North East is channeling the observations of the child protagonist,
so that narrative voice was tricky to maintain. I had to balance the child
protagonist’s insightful observations with her lack of understanding of what is
actually going on. It wasn’t going to work if the child protagonist was too
precocious, too cheeky, too knowing. When I worked on Santa Rosa and North East,
I had to be conscious of what a child could actually interpret about what was
happening around her and what the reader would then draw from those observations.
I scrapped quite a bit of material along the way. The child protagonist can’t
offer insight into why something is the way it is or why someone around her is
behaving a certain way, but, she can render those observations in a way that
allows the reader to be “in the know.” The child protagonist can’t be too aware,
it wouldn’t ring true, but, she can have tremendous insight and sensitivity. I
tried to posit myself in the time and place of the novels’ protagonist, remembering
what it was like to be that age and to know that there is a world around you
that you have no way into—physically or psychologically. Christine’s
synesthesia does, however, allow her another dimension of cognition—albeit it
is very much her own way of interpreting the world around her, herself and, as
we see as she grows older, her creative and artistic growth. With Christine’s
synesthesia, the reader knows what’s going on but Christine doesn’t have the
experience and vocabulary to label it. She simply thinks this is normal and
doesn’t attach a definition to these experiences, they simply are. She has no
way of knowing that everyone else is not experiencing the world in the same way.
I tried other narrative styles for the books, but, having a narrator filter the
experiences of the child protagonist created a kind of distance, a filter, the
kind of dream-like quality that I wanted where the characters move through the
novel like ghosts.
Ore:
Set in 1960s
Edmonton, Santa Rosa and North East are, like your poems, richly
detailed. What attracts you to this time and place, how did you go about the
research, and how do you curate the detail?
Wendy McGrath:
This was the time and
place of my childhood and, when I started the Santa Rosa trilogy, I was
reflecting on my own family in that time and place in Edmonton. The
neighbourhood of Santa Rosa had been absorbed into another community by vote of
city council so, just like that, an old working-class neighbourhood disappeared.
What did that disappearance mean? I extended that idea to the people that lived
in that neighbourhood—their small tragedies, their triumphs, their
experiences—where did they go? I imagined them as ghostly presences that exist
in another sphere somewhere, so I put them on the page. I try to immerse myself
in the time and place I write about: the objects, the products. I visited the
Edmonton City Archives, looked at old photographs, and listened to the music of
the time. I became the time and place.
Ore:
“It was like
she was inside the radio in the car and the songs were inside her body.” This
is from a tension-filled passage in North
East describing the journey from Edmonton to visit relatives in
Saskatchewan. The relationships, the expansion and compression of distance and
space, openings and closings, the inside and outside, the real and imagined, the
contained and the uncontainable, create an almost unbearable pressure. You were
born in Prince Albert and live in Edmonton. How have your writing life and
sensibilities been shaped by the places through which you travel?
Wendy McGrath:
My family travelled
“home” to Saskatchewan from Edmonton a lot when I was a child. We made the
trips in different seasons, set-out at different times of the day (or night).
Looking back on those journeys, every trip seems unique but then, at the same
time, they also blur together—we’d tick off the towns as we passed them every
10 miles and we’d listen to different music on the radio, different announcers
and ads. There were trips where my mother read entire books to us: Little Women, Hans Brinker and the Silver
Skates…the cloistered space of the car was both comforting and
disconcerting. We felt safe in the backseat with our blankets and pillows but
my parents often seemed to be talking a different language when I listened to
them (while pretending to be asleep). There was always excitement when we got
ready to go to Saskatchewan, packed up the car and took off. That same sense of
excitement—of travelling toward and away from one place to another is still
with me no matter where I go now as an adult. Those childhood trips to Saskatchewan
showed me that worlds can exist at the same time in different places and it
also gave me a real sense of time and distance passing—those long stretches of
prairie highway where you seem to drive into the horizon forever.
