Interview by Cara Nelissen
The Growing Room Festival is taking place from March 8-17, 2019. In this Q&A series we chat with some of the writers being featured at the festival about their work and the importance of community. Below is an interview with Canisia Lubrin, who will give the keynote address on March 17. Have a look at all the Growing Room events and get your tickets here!
You’re giving the final keynote at this year’s Growing Room festival! How are you feeling? How have you been preparing?
Writing the keynote is the essential thing. I am reading and writing and thinking. In all of that, I am holding the writers and artists and friends and peers who will gather in Vancouver for the Growing Room Festival as close as I can to the ethical imagination I hope to inspire in the address, which is titled The Space Between Words.
How important is it for writers and readers to have a physical place to gather and connect? In what has being in community with other writers been important to your own work? In what ways has it been challenging?
It is a crucial thing. Writers come in many forms, guises and responses to the chaos of living. Some writers exist in the epicenter of things and are quite content to do so. Others yet are at a reasonable distance from the things that generate their obsessions. And are others at a remove, at a space from which they can negotiate their sensibilities and utterances through stillness. Writers do what is required for their work. That may seem the be-all and end-all for many looking into things from the outside but the work of gathering is important. How a writer might enter that, accounting to themselves and to others who are similarly engaged, depends on the writer. Community is how I think and speak and evoke. It is a verb. It is an act of self in relation to others so it comes with its challenges, many of which involve the many ways that we are accountable to one another and often can fail in that regard. My immediate writing community is small, but essential to the work I am doing. I get to test my ideas in that small pool either in tandem with the page or before that work of writing things. Writing is a necessary social act and gathering in its name is part of our accounting to the broader life that results from it.
Who is your “ideal reader”? Who do you speak to in your work? What is your favourite thing about meeting your readers in person? What has it been like to meet people who don’t know you personally, but who have read your work?
I have met many readers over the last short while and I am always shook by the ones who tell me how the work moved them. The crying reader and the laughing reader and the puzzled reader. I don’t know that I currently have a favourite thing to report because I am still catching up to the experience of having a book in the world that has done something. Or seems to have.
I’ve always found something bizarre in that question about the ideal reader and so I’ve also resisted idealizing readers. I think I’m still in that place, though I appreciate the important considerations at the heart of this question. I would hope that it is clear from my work who I write for. I imagine, perhaps, that each project might address an explicit reader. Voodoo Hypothesis attempted to speak to the dead and to the living who have any sense of accountability to the dead under history’s rampant over-erasure of its own acts of racialized violence. With particular love and attention to Black peoples, I attempted to speak in the multivalence of the continuing afterlife of that history. This was, and, I think, still is an impossible thing that I tried to do. I had to abandon the usual acts of standard English syntax and constantly evade the usual analytical tools and taxonomies that would pull me back to things like the “ideal reader”. Who is an ideal reader then? The one who finds the work and is able to respond to its invitation? The one who will claim to understand it? The one who will have enjoyed it? Been unsettled by it? Who is the ideal reader? I write for my people, of course. And if it is true that (good) literature is transcendent, then readers will transcend the explicit and be held in the humanity at the heart of what literature tries to do.
How do you feel about the stereotype of the writer as a solitary figure? In what ways have you found this to be true/untrue in your own writing life? How much (internal or external) silence do you need in order to write?
I stated earlier that writing is a social act. I think I mean this to hold the many, many ways that writers exist in the world. Some writers prefer to be solitary for whatever reasons. Some writers might tell you they have no choice but to be solitary. I am not prone to considering myself solitary but I do spend a lot of time alone. I do have an astounding small group of people I think with and talk with and I know the work of my responsibility to the world that I write into, for, and out-of. That is a real responsibility. I am a socially conscious person. I always have been and I cannot simply accept that all I need to do is write and be alone. My writing enters the work of what Dionne Brand offers as “toward liberation”, what Toni Morrison calls “a sharpening of the moral imagination”. That is work that also puts me in the real, hard-won, mudbound work of being in the chaos of the world and doing what I also can do off the page.
What’s the ideal writing snack?
I don’t have one. But I love tea, mangoes, fresh fruit.
What is something that makes you excited or gives you hope right now?
Many of the emerging voices entering the literary imagination right now. The writers who are coming into being during a time that threatens the very foundation of a world we like to think of as having progressed from the dark recesses of a bygone world. We are seeing so much of that illusion coming apart and it is our lot to find new models for intervening in that crucial work of imagining our way out. I am filled with hope at that possible future.
What are you most looking forward to at Growing Room? Any events you’re definitely checking out?
I’m really looking forward to my panel with Alicia Elliott and Elizabeth Renzetti. I’d be remiss to not mention the keynote. It will be my first festival keynote. I won’t be at the festival until the last couple days but I hope to catch a few events before I fly out.
Canisia Lubrin, editor, critic educator and awards-nominated cross-genre writer of Voodoo Hypothesis (2017), has contributed to journals, anthologies, TV, radio, festivals and stages on four continents.