C (3:07)

Well, no, it did. This. This particular book did start with the very personal, and. And I was a bit of a different process than a lot of poetry. I think with a lot of poetry, the writer sort of has a thought or some images and thinks, oh, there's a poem there. And much of this didn't start that way. Much of this started with almost kind of just a recording, journaling of sort of like, I have to get this down just from a factual point of view. And some of these sequences in the book, there's some about bodily trauma, and I'm literally, you know, taking all these drugs after surgeries and stuff and thinking, you know, I got to record what's going on in my head and whatever, just so just recording. And then there's things happening in family that similarly went on in some cases, for many years, actually decades. And so there's an urge to just simply record. And a lot of the materials started as sort of journal entries. And then I start to, you know, work with them in the sense of, you want to make. You want to use writing to make sense of life, essentially, and say, what does this mean? You see, I've got these anecdotes recorded here, but what can I take from them? And then from there, they started to kind of evolve as poems. And I had thoughts about, well, should I share these? Because a lot of them were very personal and to work through all that process with various friends and family and colleagues. And then eventually I got to this process of having them collected in the book.

B (5:05)

What's your advice for people? I'm asking you a craft question now because I think this is really important for me. What's your advice to people who have those, let's say, journal entries? And they think, okay, there's a poem in this. What's your advice on transferring those and making them into a poem? Because one of the things I see a lot with especially emerging writers is the tendency to kind of assume their journal entries are the poem. And most of the time they're not. And in fact, I would argue, and I'm just speaking from my own journal slash diary entries, like they're embarrassing. You shouldn't share that with people. Maybe you're a therapist. What's your advice in transforming it from a journal entry to a piece of art, which is something that's very different. A journal serves a different purpose than a piece of art, at least in my opinion.

C (5:57)

Yeah, well, there's. I think there's multiple steps in there, and one is just making the writing more impactful. You know, when we write just in journals typically, or in little notes to ourselves, we're not in any way editing, and we shouldn't be. We're just scribbling it all down. And so certainly the sort of going back and reviewing something and editing and making it more concise, but more importantly, probably more impactful. So you say, well, this is a word which is kind of meaningless in this context. Or I can take this phrase out, and readers don't need this. And particularly in poetry. Poetry tries to have as much impact as possible in really as few words as possible. So that's part of the process. And then having a bit of an eye, once you're through a few stages of editing, of where is the meaning in this? And I talk about sort of making meaning from journal entries and that kind of thing. In other words, you're really starting to think a little bit about a reader. And in my case, you know, really as a poet, I think it really comes to metaphor a lot and the commonalities. And so I know I've just been out doing a bunch of readings, and people come up to me afterwards, and they've had experiences in families and in their lives and so on that have created a lot of trauma and disruption that are quite different than the experiences I have had. But the metaphors and the imagery and the impact of the language resonate with them. And they say, oh, I totally get that image of trying to rescue someone out at sea. Or I can totally get that, because in my family, this happened. So that's really where, as a writer, I think you have to get to is not just, oh, poor me. Or you know, oh, this is something that happened in my life last Tuesday. People, you know, we really can't care about that because there's too many people in this world. But we can see common human experiences.

B (8:30)

That's such a great answer. I'm thinking about the poems that are from the perspective of a parent looking at their child. And the child we already know is going to be set adrift in his life. And as a parent, as a mother of four, I often look at my teenagers specifically and think about them in the backseat of my car looking in the rearview mirror at them when they were younger. And I'm being very specific with this image because it's an image in one of Lauren's homes. What happened to you? How did we get from there to there? And so I know, because we've spoken about this prior to this interview, that these poems are rooted in your life. And again, I am making distinction and not saying these are totally autobiographical because it can't be said of all poems, but I know they're rooted in your life. How did you deal with writing about things, experiences, and people in your family, people who you love through poetry, but do that in a way that felt morally and ethically viable?

C (9:42)

Yeah, well, it's a few different things going on. You know, one. One is sort of separating yourself from the other person. And so at the time that I'm writing a lot of this about experiences with. With our. Our youngest son in particular, he is well. Well into adulthood. And we as parents sort of come to this realization. Our lives and his are not the same life. And I, as a creator, need to sort of work on what I am writing and what's significant to me. And what I sort of discovered was that I, you know, really, I was writing about the family experience, the parental experience. And much of what's written here is really worth having in mind all the other family members that we've met along our journey of, you know, 25 or 30 years who have a family member who's in distress and how alone they often feel. And so I really see it as being important to share some of this material to destigmatize that kind of trauma in family lives. People, you know, we all, especially in the age maybe, of social media, want to make. Make our lives look good. And I think people who are experiencing difficulty really need to see, oh, there's these things that happen in families, and people are willing to talk about it. The other. There's other elements in there not directly identifying the person involved. As you said earlier, there is an element of. It's almost a little bit like memoir where you're compressing incidents and, you know, shifting things a little bit, certainly not naming names. And so there's no danger of, you know, a person being sort of called out in public or anything like that. My youngest son has a different surname than me. You know, there's no sort of identification piece in there. And then finally, when it was coming close to publication, we had been estranged from him for many years, and we reconnected relatively recently, and I shared the manuscript with him. And said, you know, if you care, here it is. And I never heard a response from him. And then as well, when the book was actually published, I gave him a copy. And so I'm very sort of up up front about this. And he just sort of asked one time, am I in there? And I said, yes. And that was almost as far as the conversation went. But if he had ever read the manuscript and said, no, I really don't like this, then I would have reviewed and recalibrated everything. So it's quite a process. And it's, you know, it is an ethical concern and something that you want to be very careful and attentive about. And the same way I know when we've shared it in other interviews and in public media and stuff, you know, media have typically been very good about sort of asking, you know, have you considered all the ethical issues around this? And essentially, yes. You know, my wife Sandy and I have have done that really for many years. You know, it's been a long process of that.

B (13:50)

I also think that I love everything you said. I also think that as writers, as artists, of course, we don't have, you know, power to do whatever we want. We don't have permission, just do what we want in the name of art. That's not it. But I think that we do have the common human right to tell our stories and, and to say how people have affected us without presuming to tell their story. Because in this. In this entire book, at no point, I'll be careful the way I say this, just the poetic voice presume to say or think what the son voice, the sun. There's no really some voice the sun character we'll call, for lack of a better term, is thinking or what exactly is going on. But it's very much rooted in the voice of the parent. And you're allowed to tell your story, I'm allowed to tell my story. You're allowed to tell about how what people do affects you. And I think there is a thin but important line there that, you know, I don't think we need. We should be silenced because somebody has done something that's affected our life, but we shouldn't talk about it because.

C (15:05)

Right. And, you know, it's. It's the same. We kind of reached a point when our son was probably about 25 where we said we can't let his trauma become our trauma by totally internalizing it. And which we had been doing, I think, up until then, and where you. And that's a really tough step as A parent. And you were mentioning, you know, looking at, you know, your kids in the rear view mirror, literally. And you know, I've certainly done. I've got a poem in an earlier book about my son as a. Just as a toddler in the backseat of the car and, and as a parent, it's really hard to sort of say, no, we have to step back here and his life is different than our life and we have to live our lives. And we have done absolutely everything we felt we could as responsible parents to help and guide and support and all. And we do, as you say, have a legitimate story to tell. And the same way anybody in any circumstance. And you see this certainly more in the field of memoir, but people can go through the same experiences and two people or two writers might write entirely different memoirs or recollections of something that they both experienced. So that's the case here where, as you say, I'm. I'm only describing what, what I experienced and what. And what we saw as, as family and, and trying to give that some context.

B (16:52)

There's the poem we step in. And I shared this poem, everybody, on my personal website. I loved it so much, and for me I'm loving it from the perspective of the addict. You know, I. I'm a daughter who is an addict. I'm sober now. But I, I felt such love in this poem, despite it being one of those kind of hard line, tough lines. There's part of the poem is we can no longer start from hope. We can only approach, sit in our responsibility and listen while he rants about landlords, employers, multi fucking national corporation, the great forces that push him around. I mean, I still get chills reading that because that's what it feels like. But as a parent too, I can't imagine. I can't imagine seeing the person you love so much as much as anything in the world, if not more than be there. And how do you let go and how do you unclench from feeling like it's your problem to fix? And what you said is that after a certain point it's not.

C (17:57)

Yeah. And you know, a little bit of you, of the perspective on some of this is, you know, my wife and I both have been involved in meditating, you know, just mindfulness meditating, which is kind of a Buddhist undertones. We're not Buddhist per se, but the sense in there of having something difficult in life and just being able to sit with it and say, I don't have a fix, I don't have a solution, but I'm Just here. And this is what it is. And this whole years long process in our family was like that. And the poem I think tries to reflect that. Many times we just felt we just had to be there. We had to be witnesses if we ever saw something that we could feel we could be helpful with. We tried to do that. But the as the book notes and most people who have been involved with addicts and people with severe mental health issues and so on have experienced where that the helpfulness at a certain point becomes pointless. So the number of times that you can bail a person out or pay their damage, deposit on a rental suite or do these kinds of things and then you think, you know what? We've done that 10 times. None of the previous 10 times worked. We just have to sit with it. We just have to be here. And that's again a very hard thing. And us what the book is trying to reflect. But it's a reality for a lot of people. I mean I'm just astounded by again go out and do readings or something is published about the book or it's on social media. The messages I get often and the direct messages, the personal messages is hey, this happened with my daughter 10 years ago or this happened with my mother or almost everybody's got some kind of significant issues that they've had to deal with and. And the book is intended to be part of people being able to deal with those scenarios.

B (20:28)

This is a book that I take with me to a lot of workshops I do. When I first got my hands on it last night even I was in a workshop and we were discussing. This is going to be a stylistic question for you. We were discussing how they're is often a misunderstanding among people who perhaps are not very familiar with contemporary poetry that the language has to be effusive, bordering on sesquipedilian, that very highfalutin that you know, similes and metaphors have to be just like you have to be waterboarded with them and you don't. I'm just going to. I'm going back to the poem. We step in just the last Bart. Soon he will sell his dead car for less than he owes, fly to the east coast where he knows no one and over time we will locate him. Go sit again. Listen, I don't want to go on like that is chilling and it's none of that. None of that has similar metaphor anywhere but stylistically it's actually quite advanced. And I was wondering if you would talk about this, about this style of Yours. And I'm to going, going to be completely upfront and say this book is the extent of my familiarity with your body of work, which is quite sad considering how you've been published. I'm looking forward to reading more of it, but I really, it was stylistically quite advanced and yet the language is very simple.

C (21:54)

Yeah, well, thanks. I mean, that's the intent, is for it to be accessible. I had the pleasure of studying with Ade Limon, who just recently finished her term as the US Poet Laureate. And before she became Poet Laureate, I had a week with her once at a workshop. And we talked about a lot of this kind of stuff. And she said, you know, there's always a choice as a poet between to what degree you want to ensure clarity. And she said, you know, I always move towards clarity. In other words, I think what a lot of us would call sort of accessible writing, where our most readers can pick it up and get the intent of it and follow. And that's not to say that the work isn't like Italy. Mons is, you know, very, very skillfully written and very carefully written, but not needing sort of extra flourishes, not needing complex language. I mean, I'm at a reasonably well educated person, you know, I have a master's degree in communications and all, but my own personal vocabulary is pretty much like anybody else's. And that's what I prefer to work with when I'm reading as well. I don't want to have to look up things and look up references, and I want things to sort of touch on every day. And I think you can do that. And certainly, I mean, there's metaphor in this, even this section about my son. The basic metaphor is about tectonic plates, which I live on. We live on out here on Vancouver island, where the metaphor is that the earth can move under your feet unpredictably at any time, and it can be catastrophic. And that's kind of the feeling of being in these family scenarios. So there's imagery in there, those kinds of experiences, but it's not in your face. And the intent is that you still understand the content whether you notice that metaphor or not. I've just got sort of subtle elements of that in the work throughout, but if the reader doesn't notice that, that's fine. They can just read it as a family story. And it's not dependent on that. And it's not dependent on having a university Prof. Help you analyze what it means. It should work on both levels when you analyze it. Yeah, there's depth There. But it's not always necessary to do that.

B (25:04)

I love that answer. And I mean it. I mean that. That part I just read is such a beautiful example of what you were talking about, because every single line is quite simple. You know, one. One sentence just being listen. But it's a fact that listeners. I know that you can't see the poem, but I don't want to go on. Is a new stanza all by itself. And it's. What's stylistically, to me, remarkable and sophisticated is the way that the poem plays out on the page there. And that. That. That line was intended to be completely by itself for a reason. And it just hit so hard that way. And I think. I think this is such a wonderful collection. It's why I take it to a lot of the places when I do, like writers in the schools and stuff like that. Maybe not to the grade fours, but. And not because I think it's inappropriate. I just think it's beyond them. Um, but I think it's a really wonderful example of, you know, like I said, how the language does not have to be highfalutin and that less is always more in poetry, always more. That doesn't mean that you cannot use metaphor or use simile or have these beautiful non sequiturs or things like that. But, you know, if it's chewy, if the language is too chewy, you need to, like, put less in people's mouths. And I really enjoyed reading your collection from the standpoint of being a poet, where it encouraged me to go through my own work and just simplify. Like, you don't have to make things difficult. Where can I make simple? And I really appreciated that. So I'd love you to read to us from your collection.

C (26:44)

Sure, I'd be happy to do that. And I'll maybe read this piece that you were just referencing.

B (26:51)

Perfect.

C (26:52)

And just to mention. So it's a section of poems that's 13 sections long called Episodic Tremor and Slip. And this is the opening piece. In that section called We Step In, There is no place to start with the mess Clothes crumpled sills stained grime on every surface flat and vertical stench blinds down a cat. There sits our son, sullen and hunched, head clamped under headphones. We can no longer start from hope. We can only approach, sit in our responsibility and listen when he rants about landlords, employers, multifucking national corporations, the great forces that push him around. He is 27 and will go nowhere with us, will not travel this territory, will not reason and accommodate the Place shakes with his explosions, his booming Plates rattle, cleavers tremble and hearts jumping. We are in full retreat again. We live in retreat Making plans for the wrong emergency. Prepare for what has passed. There is always hope, friends say. Friends didn't see that basement suite we rented for him the fall. We hoped he would go back, finish a high school course. A landlord calls, we step in and here's a window screen, flimsy frame, wobbling mesh cut out, Knife blades scorched into enamel. The kitchen range stripped down to bare burners. Someone needed to get closer to the flame. Soon he will sell his dead car for less than he owes, fly to the east coast where he knows no one, and over time, we will locate him. Go sit. Again. Listen, I don't want to go on.

B (29:16)

Thank you so much again. That's just. That's really, really gorgeous. And I really encourage everyone to pick up Lauren's book again, published by the University of Calgary Press. What is Broken Binds Us. And tell me, where did you come up with, and I'm going to use the parlance of my teenagers right now, this banger of a title.

C (29:39)

The publisher really led me to it. I had a different title, but they found it in one of the poems. And then when they came up with the COVID design here, which is really stunning, it convinced me. But yeah, really, they just said, you know, everything in this book is about things being broken, but the bond and the binding of that experience and how we as humans are connected by the very brokenness of our existence. So, yeah, it was their idea and they got me to come around and I love it now.

B (30:23)

Wonderful. Yeah. For people who maybe are driving or not. Looking at the COVID of the book, I know you can see it on the MBN page, but it's like marble statue with fissures of it, which when I looked closer I saw it looked like they were gold. But I also. I interpreted it as light at first, which reminded me of that quote from Rumi, which is something to. The effect of the wounds are what lets the light in which I was like, wow, this is so meta.

C (30:58)

Yeah. And it's the. It's an example of the Japanese art form called kintsugi, which deals with broken porcelain items which are put back together with gold seams. And then it becomes more when it's put back together. And I thought that in itself is just a wonderful imagery and wonderful metaphor for what's happening.

B (31:25)

Yeah, no, it was like I said, when I first looked at the COVID I thought it was light, but then I look closer I'm like, no, this is, like, fused back together. So really, I really loved it. My next question for you is about writing about the body. And this is something that I'm invariably interested in, about how we externalize the internal mysteries and pains of our bodies. Now, you said you were journaling before on all these medications, which sounds fun, but trippy fun. I've. I once took one prescription painkiller, for one thing, and I have no memory of the whole event, which is why, I suppose, being an addict didn't work out for me. I take Tylenol and I fall asleep. But I wanted to talk about that. And what. I always have reservations. So maybe this is just this book acting like a mirror for me. I have reservations about talking and writing about the body, which sounds strange to anyone who knows that I've written repeatedly about cervixes, but I actually do. It's something that I have to work myself into. I was wondering if you could talk about writing about the body and how you approached writing about bodies and pain.

C (32:34)

Yeah, well, it was. What kind of struck me was I had a fairly catastrophic accident now, almost 15 years ago, I think it was, but really just changed the direction in the course of my life. And, you know, with physical breaks in the body and concussions and all kinds of things. And what really struck me was the disruption, but then also how it changes the thinking processes. And some of those in there, some of those combs are different in the sense of. I do try to get at a little bit the experience of literally being medicated, and you're medicated for pain and your mind is doing different things, and that's really such a different experience. We go through our lives with certain thought processes and thinking processes, and those get disrupted as well as when the body gets disrupted. And so I was really writing about disruption. I had been very, very fortunate to be, you know, quite fit and very active and, you know, focused on a lot of fitness stuff, you know, running marathon and doing all these wonderful things. And the breakdown of my body was it really changes your view of, well, what's my life about? And frankly, probably gives you more empathy for all the people. And it's, again, most of us who have some limitations in body in one way or another, whether it's disease or a disability or accidental trauma or whatever. And so that's where that section comes from, is just trying to. I keep coming back to the term make sense of. You know, I'm writing all this down, and I was writing down things that happened after this accident. And then trying to make sense of it. Why is my thinking so changed? And so on.

B (35:00)

And the thing is, you're talking about really catastrophic events and very jarring events in your life. But the tone of it, and maybe this goes back to the meditation you're talking about was very calm. Like, I felt like a cat by a big fire. And I found it very reassuring to be talking about undeniably painful and traumatic events and to be reading about them and immersed in them in a really calm way that didn't at all distance me from them. In fact, I would say that it pulled me into them more because I didn't have that metaphorical arm out, just like trying to protect myself from something that set me. And I wanted you to talk about that tone because your tone is not like anything I've actually ever read before. Like you. If I was going to write about something manic and catastrophic, I think my tone would be. Yours is the opposite.

C (35:59)

Yeah, I don't know. It's a good question, Holly. You know, it might just be personality. I'm a sort of meditative person and I'm an observer. And so my personality might have just kind of led me to that observing, like, oh, you know, how has my life changed? And what's this like? But also, you know, again, once you start writing something, thinking, well, what is appropriate for other readers? And certainly you don't want to traumatize people and you don't want to share details that maybe have no sort of purpose. And so my purpose in all this material is sort of the life awareness and making sense of a person's life. So it's not intended to re. Experience the trauma, I think, you know, I'm just trying to think of remembering exactly how I open up into this. But there's not. The actual initial incident that threw me into this scenario was. There's very little of that there. It's just like it's more the aftermath, you know, what. What changes in your life. And yeah, so it's. It's probably, like I say, a lot of just sort of what. What I'm interested in. I'm always interested in how people think through their lives and experience them and consolidate elements of your life and go somewhere interesting or further from where you were. All these things that happen in our lives are life changing, but they should also be enriching in some way in terms of making us better understand what life is all about.

B (38:10)

Yeah, thank you for that. I love what you said about sharing details with purpose as opposed to for a lack Of a better term, and I'm sure there is a better term, but one that I see bandied about is trauma porn. Just trauma for the sake of trauma. That's the only reason you're really sharing it. And it really did feel like there is a purpose behind every single element that you, you shared here. And like I said, I love this book and I absolutely take it everywhere with me. And it also is a book that made me think a lot about disability and about how the world is set up and about how our brains are set up. And there seems to this kind of blindness to the fact that everybody's going to be disabled at one point and the other. This may not have. Yeah, like it may not apply to us now, but it will.

C (39:03)

No. And it really struck me, I think it's just a couple of lines in there in the one poem. But you know, it was really profound awareness for me the first time that I went out in a wheelchair, you know, on my own, nobody pushing me or whatever. And like a totally new awareness which when you're able bodied, unfortunately we don't notice these things or we don't have that awareness. But you know, realizing that a one and a half inch curb, you know, on a sidewalk is almost unsurmountable for a self powered wheelchair, especially if someone doesn't have strong, you know, upper body strength and so on. And like an awareness that's totally wasn't there for me. You know, I was ignorant before I had to deal with all of that. And then realizing that, you know, you kind of think, well, we live in a somewhat accessible world. But no, not really. You know, the number of places where there's steps and stairs and slopes and rough surfaces and rocks and twigs and stuff that, you know, no, you can't roll through, that is really profound. So again, I think that's kind of the value of writing about some of these experiences is just seeing our world differently. And I wouldn't want to experience all of the things I've experienced again if I could roll back and not have those things happen. But they certainly probably made me a lot more empathetic to the wide populace of people who deal with these issues.

B (41:02)

Yeah, I think it was really important also for me in my reception to consider how when I was reading these poems I felt like I was being spoken to and not yelled at about things. Which I think for a reception, like nobody's receptive when we're being yelled at or lectured. It's not. But because I felt like I was really being spoken to And I'm in an unfortunate position of annoying a little bit. You know, when you're at an event and the bathroom's in the basement and you're like, why is. My hips don't fit in their sockets properly anymore, so it really hurts unless I've done like an hour of stretching. And that's a very minor issue compared to what so many people live with. And I did a lot of reflecting on how fighting for a more accessible and less ableist world is. You know, some people don't see how it benefits them. Well, it will. If you can't do it for other people, do it for your future self, because probably chances are at one point you're going to need these accommodations as much as anybody. So I really enjoyed that part of the book as well. So, Lauren, my final question for you is, what are you working on now?

C (42:16)

Well, I've got a manuscript which is quite different from this one of history of Western Alberta. And it's very kind of place based, but looking at settler experience and trying to pull in a bit of sort of First Nation awareness, but the transformation of industry over generations set in sort of western Alberta. And I think, again, is sort of really relevant to our world, where it's really the focus is on how we change places, but also how places create us. And that's always been a fascination for me. We become sort of formed by these environments that we live in, particularly the ones we grow up in as children, I think are really formative. And so I'm trying to pull together about 300 years of experience in that one and sort of show this place multidimensional, the views of many different people and over many different periods of time.

B (43:37)

That is so fascinating. It made me think when you said about the places we grew up as children, how formative they are. I was speaking with one of my kids this morning and I had pine needles in my hair. I have no idea what I was doing, but I was outside obviously doing something, and she was brushing them out of my hair. And I said, I don't think I want to live somewhere where I can't get pine needles in my hair every day. And when I grew up somewhere where I constantly have pine needles in my hair and underfoot and how, you know, that that has definitely made me who I am. So I really look forward to encountering your manuscript when it's out. I know you said it, you're working on it. I'm not sure if you have a publisher, so no pressure, but get it out there. I look forward to reading it. Lauren thank you so much for joining me today, everyone. We have been talking to Lauren, Daniel, thank you. About his marvelous new poetry collection what Is Broken Binds Us, which was released 2025 with the University of Calgary Press. Thanks again. Lauren.

C (44:35)

Thanks Holly. It's been delighted.