Homelands & Belly Dancers: On Writing About Obsessions
"I’ve recently experienced a monumental shift in my work. For over eight years, I had been writing about There, the homeland—it was a way for me to deal with generational trauma and pull myself closer to my elders—but now I’ve started writing about Here and the issues I face as a child of Arab immigrants. My stories are set in Richmond Hill instead of Baghdad, and my poems are becoming less about war and exile and more about youth and independence.On a less, but perhaps more peculiar, note, I’ve been fascinated by the belly dancer in Mashrou’ Leila’s music video for “Lil Watan.” She inspired my most recent short story, and even when I’m not writing about her, I watch the video to help deal with writer’s block.These fixations had me thinking about how writers move through phases. I became curious about what was occupying the minds of others, so I asked six writers to share their current obsessions. Reading their answers has generated more (rhetorical, for now) questions: Do we ever fully move out of a phase? Does writing about an obsession clear our minds of it, or deepen its impression?Here’s what the writers had to say:
Adèle Barclay: Lately when people ask what I'm working on I like to whisper "intimacy" and then shout "POWER." Jokes aside, I am definitely hanging out poetically with these concepts—which isn't necessarily new for me, but I feel like I'm addressing variations on these themes in fairly blunt and bald ways. Poetry these days feels like I'm playing radical vulnerability chicken with myself. At the same time, I hope to take care of myself and my reader while contending with these violent and tender atmospheres. I hope that even when I'm being plain and direct there's still some mystery and diplomacy.
Dina Del Bucchia: I think I’ve already done this to a degree, but I’m continually fascinated by how what is often considered to be superficial is significant, and that what we leave out of “Big Literature” is something important. For me those are the ways that pop culture or culture that is feminized are dismissed and considered lesser. I’ve also been writing a lot about extinct megafauna and cryptids, which again, might seem like ridiculous things, but I’ve been exploring ideas of mental health and self-worth in relation to both.
Does writing about an obsession clear our minds of it, or deepen its impression?
Leah Horlick: I’ve been writing a suite of poems about my great-grandparents’ Jewish community in Romania for about a year; one of my core questions is how (or if) the scripture that sustained my ancestors relates to my queer body. It’s brought up an old insecurity about not being able to read Hebrew—and I’ve finally just got the time and opportunity to learn! I’m really fixated on how being able to decode Hebrew letters might influence my writing, or change how I feel about myself. I think learning a new cultural skill in the midst of this project will be powerful.
Nyla Matuk: Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about transatlantic ocean liners bringing 20th century emigrants to North America, specifically, the one my father took to Ellis Island. It was called 'The Homeland.'
Sina Queyras: Writing My Ariel these past few years I’ve been in a state of depression and rage. Confronting Plaths’ legacy made me confront my own and I couldn’t believe we were still “in the shit.” Then suddenly young women did what my generation failed to do: they broke through the idea that this situation, like it or not, was somehow status quo. I’m humbled. Grateful. Disoriented: all the concrete around me has exploded. I remember way back when I felt that imagining worlds could make them so. That’s where I want to go in my work and in my life: building new worlds.
Jen Sookfong Lee: Right now, I’m really ruminating on the idea of wealth and power—what do those things look like in communities that aren’t primarily white? So often, our discussions are about white privilege, but how does privilege work in, for example, the Chinese Canadian community? I’m in the early concept stages for a novel and I think I might be exploring this, as well as Munchausen by proxy syndrome, because who am I if I am not writing about moms who do bad things?
Adèle Barclay’s writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, PRISM, The Pinch, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the 2016 Lit POP Award for Poetry and the 2016 Walrus Readers’ Choice Award for Poetry. Her debut poetry collection If I Were in a Cage I'd Reach Out for You (Nightwood, 2016) won the 2017 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is the Interviews Editor at The Rusty Toque, the Critic-in-Residence for Canadian Women In Literary Arts, and an editor at Rahila's Ghost Press.
Dina Del Bucchia is the author of three collections of poetry: Coping with Emotions and Otters (Talonbooks, 2013), Blind Items (Insomiac Press, 2014), and Rom Com (Talonbooks 2015), the latter written with her Can’t Lit podcast co-host Daniel Zomparelli. She is an editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine and the Artistic Director of the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series. Her first collection of short stories, Don’t Tell Me What to Do, is out now with Arsenal Pulp Press. You can find out more about her at dinadelbucchia.com.
Leah Horlick is a writer from Saskatoon. She is the author of Riot Lung (Thistledown Press, 2012) and For Your Own Good (Caitlin Press, 2016), which was named a 2016 Stonewall Honor Title by the American Library Association. The winner of the 2016 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Writers, she lives on Unceded Coast Salish Territories in Vancouver.
Nyla Matuk is the 2018 Mordecai Richler Writer in Residence at McGill University.Sina Queyras is the author of My Ariel, MxT, and Lemon Hound.
Jen Sookfong Lee was born and raised in Vancouver’s East Side, and she now lives with her son in North Burnaby. Her books include The Conjoined, nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award and a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, The Better Mother, a finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award, The End of East, and Gentlemen of the Shade. Jen appears regularly as a contributor on The Next Chapter and on CBC Radio One and teaches writing at The Writers’ Studio with Simon Fraser University.
