Nightjar<\/em> is about mountains as old oceans in the sky, fog, vapour, and stones.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s true, Nightjar <\/em>is slightly more interested in human history and the ways we pass through and often alter natural landscapes. As a result, the collection also follows my own transcontinental movements between Nova Scotia, the Rockies and then back to Nova Scotia where I now live in an old, oceanfront home that was once a ship\u2019s chandlery. There is a grave in the yard, where daffodils <\/sup>bloom. Pipe stems, coins and lead shot can be found in the tidal mud along the shore. Living with these visible markings of how these places and spaces have changed over time has brought me to a poetics that considers the importance of these stories.\u00a0<\/p>\nScorch<\/em> began as my thesis. I completed my MFA at UBC Okanagan in 2022. The degree gave me the skill and practice I needed to talk about my work, frame and contextualize it, as well as work through a full-length manuscript project for the first time. For my second collection, I found the process to be much more relaxed and natural. I enjoyed seeing the structures emerge naturally throughout the writing process.\u00a0<\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>: What would you say were your main influences while writing Nightjar<\/em>? And how did this title come to you? \u00a0<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: This title did not come for a long time. Scorch <\/em>came at the very end of the writing process, and so I expected the same for the second collection. However, it wasn\u2019t until quite close to publication that I settled on Nightjar.<\/em><\/p>\nI knew the second collection enacted a falling sideways through the one-way gates and passages that make up our lives. The image of the nightjar falling in the poem \u201cMill Pond at Dusk\u201d was the most striking image of the unexpected forces that pull us into newness and possibility.\u00a0Nightjar<\/em> is a landscape of night images, iron red streams and bogs, eel grass, black trumpet, doors and gateways, fossils, a path grown over by old apple trees.\u00a0<\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>: In Scorch<\/em>, I especially love the poem \u201cSummer Mountain.\u201d From the first few stanzas, I gather that you lived for a few summer months in a rustic cabin near Protection Mountain, in the Banff area. How long were you there, and how isolated was it? Is this a place you\u2019ve returned to since? I notice that Protection Mountain is mentioned again in your acknowledgements for Nightjar<\/em>; were some of the Nightjar<\/em> poems written on a return visit?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: I lived in the cabin under Protection Mountain in Banff National Park for a total of nine months over the two years that I worked for National Parks in Lake Louise. The cabin is only about 20 minutes from Lake Louise, but in an area where there was no cell service, and I would sometimes stay there into the late fall, or until the pipes started to freeze. The grey light from Castle Mountain and Protection Mountain was only lonely in the way I wanted it to be lonely. I loved falling asleep to the metallic screeching of trains. I\u2019ve returned once since, and over the summer of 2023 I lived there and wrote the high altitude, mountain section of Nightjar.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>:\u00a0 In \u201cSummer Mountain,\u201d you write, \u201cI wanted to be lonely,\u2026\u201d and in the poem, \u201cSlit of Morning Light,\u201d\u00a0 \u201cI want to feel alone but don\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0 What is the role of solitude in your work?\u00a0 How important is it be alone, or even lonely? Did those periods of time under Protection Mountain change your relationship to \u2013 or feelings about \u2013 solitude?<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: I wanted to feel a sense of agency in my life, and a ruthless independence. At the time, the Okanagan hillsides were burning, and my own life was in a similar state. My marriage had ended, and I wanted the clear air of being alone. I wanted \u201cthis impossible \/ distance\u201d and \u201cmountains \/ of impossible cloud slants and snow,\u201d as the opening poem in Scorch<\/em> states. In my isolation, I found my voice echoing back in a way I hadn\u2019t ever experienced before. A burnt-out hole of grief, perhaps. The loneliness I found under Protection Mountain was one that offered me exactly what it was named for. Shelter. Reprieve. Protection as I moved between one thing and the next.\u00a0<\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>: In Scorch\u2019<\/em>s \u201cAfter the Forest Fire,\u201d you write,\u00a0<\/p>\n\u2026Poetry<\/em>the deer, the hillside,<\/em>the moon.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nHow does a poem come to be, for you, and what is your editorial process like? Do your poems often come out fairly polished on the first draft? Do you tend to pare them down, or to add to them, over time?\u00a0<\/p>\n
NR<\/strong>: That sentiment came from walking the Okanagan hills with a friend, and I would say most of my poems occur after walking in the forest. Poems usually come out fairly polished and close to their final form. I only sit down to write if I\u2019ve caught myself on a sharp image or have a heard or felt sense of what I want to say. I like to write in front of a window. I\u2019m lucky enough now to have a writing room that overlooks the tidal river.\u00a0<\/p>\nI like to tinker, and unsettlingly I could tinker with poems for ages. The poems change the most in the final stages of the editing process before a collection gets printed. That\u2019s when I pare down and look for redundancies. How a poem appears on the page is very important to me, but its aural quality is far more important. I\u2019ll often read the whole collection and record it so that when I play it back, I can hear where my edits need to be made.<\/p>\n
Andrew Steeves once likened my poems to dry fly fishing, and while I don\u2019t know a lot about fly fishing, I would have to agree with this statement. A sparse and pared down approach is what feels most natural. I see the world in a series of patterned images, and so I consider my poems to be small language machines that cast out and pull back. Just a barb or a hook that gets straight to the point. Nothing flourished or fancy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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EJ<\/strong>: The titular poem in Scorch<\/em> explores a post-wildfire landscape in the Okanagan. What was it like to write in and about this environment?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: At that time, I was interested in exploring individual systems of loss within larger systems of ecological loss. I was living in an ecoculture center as part of a writing residency I was doing through UBC-Okanagan and became very interested in learning the names of grasses and wildflowers that grew in that semi-arid desert landscape. Often, ash fell from the sky like snow. I wanted the poems to enact both the emergency of climate crisis and the emergence of newness, while recognizing that a useful kind of hopefulness is one that considers that loss and beauty sometimes entwine. I found this hopefulness in the arrow leaf balsam root flower or the ponderosa pines with their thick, red, armour-like bark. Scorch <\/em>ended up being my goodbye to the Okanagan, as I moved east shortly after it was published.\u00a0<\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>: So many of the poems in both of your collections respond to place, falling somewhere between geopoems, ecopoems, and contemplative meditations, set or written in the Okanagan, the Banff area, Nova Scotia, and elsewhere. Which place \u2013 or places \u2013 are you writing about now?<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: In 2023, I moved to the South Shore of Nova Scotia. In my second collection, there are many \u201cecopoems\u201d about the landscape around my home: the brook, the berry patch, the loop through the old apple orchard behind the house, the tidal river, and the old roads and wells. After many years of feeling unsettled and adrift in British Columbia and Alberta, I feel for the first time, a sense of home. I\u2019ve been warmly welcomed to this little cove and have a growing sense of community and belonging here.\u00a0<\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>: What are you working on these days? Is there a new poetry collection in progress?<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: I\u2019m about sixty pages into a third collection of poems which I hope to complete by early spring, 2026. One of my favourite poems in this new collection, \u201cEel Weir\u201d was shortlisted for The Malahat\u2019s<\/em> Long Poem Prize in 2025. I think my work will always be connected to landscape and the natural world.\u00a0<\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>: What have you been reading lately that you\u2019ve found especially interesting or inspiring? What are you looking forward\u00a0to reading next?<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: Some titles I\u2019ve enjoyed lately are: The Summer Book <\/em>by Tove Jansson, Indelicacy<\/em> by Amina Cain, East of Eden<\/em> by John Steinbeck, Simple Passion by <\/em>Annie Ernaux, Cold Enough for Snow<\/em> by Jessica Au. In terms of poetry, I\u2019ve been reading Louise Gluck\u2019s The Wild Iris, A Village Life: Poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective<\/em>, Richard Siken\u2019s Crush<\/em>, Victoria Chang\u2019s The Trees Witness Everything<\/em>, and a re-read of an old favourite, Lorine Niedecker\u2019s The Granite Pail.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nEJ<\/strong>: What else has been inspiring you lately, in writing or in other\u00a0aspects of your life?<\/p>\nNR<\/strong>: The garlic harvest. Beans, ground cherries, cabbage, sunflowers, tomatoes and lavender. Driving the Cabot Trail in early June. The small marine museums throughout Nova Scotia. Islands, with their fog and kelp covered rocks. My partner, Michael, and what it means to be two poets moving through the world noticing the bog laurel and moonwort and candy lichen. Working the night shift and moving through hemlock forests under stars. The way sea-light comes through our one-hundred-year-old windows.\u00a0<\/p>\n*This interview may have been edited for length or clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n\u2013 Elena Johnson<\/p>\n
ELENA JOHNSON<\/strong> is the author of\u00a0Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Gaspereau, 2015), aNotes de terrain pour la toundra alpine<\/em>, was published in 2021 by Jardin de givre<\/em>, and won the <\/p>\n
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