Photo by Gordon Hill
Interview by David Ly
Amy LeBlanc’s debut poetry collection, I know something you don’t, is a magical journey. LeBlanc has a natural eye for beauty, and even the darkest moments of the collection’s poems entice the reader to journey further into the work. I know something you don’t transports the reader to another world; one from a poet who wields her imagination powerfully, with immense control and intent.
David Ly: Congratulations on this magical collection, Amy. The poems are written with such a fairy-tale lucidity that just drew me further in as I kept reading. How and why did you decide to use fairy-tale imagery and references throughout the book?
Amy LeBlanc: Thank you so much, David! I fell in love with fairy tales when I was a child and the stories have just stayed with me. When I read the Grimm’s fairy tales for the first time and discovered that they were much darker than the Disney versions, I fell even more in love. They contain all of my favourite elements and motifs: ghosts, haunted houses, poisonous plants, witches, and so much more.
I just recently finished reading White as Milk, Red as Blood: The Forgotten Fairy Tales of Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. He was a contemporary of the Grimm’s brothers, but his stories weren’t memorialized in the same way. In 2009, an archivist in Germany found a chest full of his stories and they were reprinted in an illustrated edition. The loss and discovery of the tales almost sounds like a fairy tale in itself.
In my collection, fairy tale imagery and references help contextualize my poems and place them within a larger body of work. I wanted to take up the fairytale thread that so many authors have written about and change them again, slightly, by using fairy tale imagery and references in poetry instead of prose and by moving the lens to show a different side of avatars that were vilified or ignored in past iterations.
DL: Who are some poets you read while writing this collection that helped you complete it?
AL: There were a few collections that I returned to again and again for inspiration and for understanding how to structure a full-length collection in a cohesive and compelling way. I read Stay, Illusion by Lucie Brock-Broido, The Embalmer by Anne-Renée Caillé (translated by Rhonda Mullins), Unicorn by Angela Carter (and Rosemary Hill), Woods Wolf Girl by Cornelia Hoogland, Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and all of Catherine Graham’s poetry collections. I also read the collected works of Anne Sexton and I Become a Delight to My Enemies by Sara Peters, which isn’t necessarily poetry, but it definitely influenced the collection; I included a line from her book as an epigraph.
DL: How did this collection begin? What was the idea you had in mind for it, and does the finished project deviate much from what you first thought?
AL: The main idea for my collection actually began as my second chapbook, Ladybird Ladybird, which was published with Anstruther Press in 2018. With that chapbook, I wanted to explore fairy tales, folklore, and nursery rhymes. I hadn’t really been considering putting together a full-length collection until I was at the Banff Centre for the Emerging Writers’ Intensive in October 2018 with Elizabeth Philips. She helped me see that I had threads that were tying my work together instead of just individual poems or small cycles of poems. On our last evening at the Centre, I began assembling my poems into one giant word document in my hotel; all of the poets had stayed up to watch The Shining and I was too freaked out to sleep. Over the next couple of months, I wrote more and I tried to refine what I wanted my collection to be. I’m not sure that I’ll ever be completely satisfied with the end result, but I’ve learned so much through the process of publishing my first full-length collection that I think I’ll be better prepared for the next one.
DL: My favourite poem has to be “Occult, n., adj.” I think it really distills the collection’s intent of weaving story and fact, the magical and the ordinary. What do you think poetry can do when it treads the line between story and fact? How does this play out in your own work?
AL: I find this question so interesting because much of my poetry is based in historical narratives. “Occult, n. adj.” is loosely based on my own family and the stories I’ve been told, but I’ve definitely taken some liberties. I think poetry is a great medium for treading the line between story and fact because there is freedom to play with spacing, rhymes, or sounds to change and subvert meaning; instead of just telling a story as it has always been told, poetry gives us the opportunity to reformulate and remix the narrative. The poems in my collection were definitely influenced by fairy tales, but folklore, historical narratives, and individual experience are also influences. When writing about historical personages or moments, I think it’s incredibly important to do research and to have a good grasp of the story before trying to change it. I wanted to avoid commodifying anyone’s story or pretending that I had new information or authority that others didn’t have. Part of what I enjoyed about writing this collection was placing the magical and the ordinary together in the same pieces; I think the juxtaposition of the two is where the magic actually happens.
DL: How did you decide on the title of the collection? Could we know about some other contenders?
AL: My two other contenders were “Conversations are not for Ghosts” or “Sillage” but neither seemed to be a perfect fit. When I came up with the final title, I was working on the title poem––which was originally titled “The White Plague,” since it’s about tuberculosis––when I realized that the singsong rhymes were hinting at something a little deeper and a little bit darker. There’s always been something slightly sinister about children’s rhymes—I think of singing Ring around the Rosie as a child and not knowing that it was about a plague, since rosy rashes were a sign of illness and herbs were thought to be a cure. I think my title came out of this sinister undertone juxtaposed with the sound of the songs.
DL: Are you currently working on anything else right now?
AL: Right now, I’m working on edits for a novella and a short story collection, which are slated for publication in 2021 and 2022. I’m also starting to work on my master’s thesis which is, ironically, a novel about a pandemic. I’ve been planning it for about two years, but I didn’t plan to be writing it during a pandemic. I’m also starting to think about a second poetry collection that might be based on true crime narratives and I have a half finished novel that I’d like to dedicate some time to.
DL: Lastly, what is something you know that we don’t?
AL: This is a completely random piece of information that I find fascinating: pigeons stay in their nests with their parents for anywhere between a month and six weeks. By the time they leave, they look full-grown, which is why we never see baby pigeons out and about.
Amy LeBlanc is currently non-fiction editor at filling station magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Room, Prairie Fire, Contemporary Verse 2, Geez, and EVENT. She is the author of two chapbooks, most recently Ladybird, Ladybird (Anstruther Press 2018).
David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020) and the chapbook Stubble Burn (Anstruther Press, 2018). His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The /temz/ Review, PRISM, and others. He is the Poetry Editor of This Magazine and sits on the Editorial Collective of Anstruther Press. Twitter: @dlylyly