The following interview is part four of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.
mclean drive,
i break loose in isolation
crashing upon the rocks of myself.
i cry for two weeks straight
only stopping for sleep
and water.
long lessons learned
the hard way:
we are only loved
the way spring loves
fresh flowers.
even in endings,
there is renewal.
i break open myself,
to form new rivers.
mwîstas kakî wâpam’tin?
Reprinted with permission from A Family of Dreamers (Talonbooks, 2023)
Rob Taylor: The second section of A Family of Dreamers focuses on your life with, and loss of, your grandparents, to whom the book is dedicated. Near the end of the section you write about experiencing sleep paralysis, and sensing that something is staring at you from the corner of the room: “this is the dreamworld / entering the waking world, i know this is grief / coming to collect.” Could you tell us a bit more about that experience? What effect has writing about it, and your memories of your grandparents, had on your experience of that grief?
Samantha Nock: A lot of my poems tell stories of me learning to look at my grief and the grief of my family head on instead of avoiding it. That poem, “the lord’s prayer,” walks through me describing the immediate moments after my grandpa Johnny’s passing and my first time being confronted with a big grief like that. I feel like experiencing sleep paralysis, and connecting it to my buried grief, was a way for me to show the physicality of grief as its own being. I literally look at it and share a room with it.
Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it. It’s also served as a way for me to honour my grandparents, both the ones that have passed and the ones still alive. It has allowed me to show my family the ways we share in this grief. It’s also been a way for me to talk to my grandparents who have passed. I never read the poem “grandma on the farm” out loud because I’m truly not sure I could get through it without crying. It’s a conversation for me and my grandma.
RT: I appreciate that, and sense the intimate nature of some of these poems. How has it felt to see your book go out into the world and reach people close to you (and strangers, for that matter)?
SN: It has been a very strange and absolutely beautiful experience seeing how strangers and people close to me relate and react to my book! I’ve always looked at my poems having a very specific audience: other Indigenous people, specifically northern Cree Métis kin, my family, and the BC Peace Region. But just because that is who I was writing too doesn’t mean that I think my work is not “for,” or inaccessible to, people who are outside of that audience. I absolutely love hearing how people have found themselves in my work and the ways they relate to it or feel called to it. There is a teacher who I am in contact with who teaches some of my poems in their class and they will share their students’ reflections with me. It honestly has made this entire ten-year process of writing this book worth it.
Writing about my grief in this way has helped me move through some of the more tough parts of grief and learn to work and live with it.
RT: What about your own response to your book, looking back over those ten years?
SN: Many of these poems have existed in some form throughout years of my life and they’ve been edited and changed as I changed. In a lot of ways the poems grew with me as I was navigating the growing up that happens in your twenties. They’re like old friends that know everything about me and the time we spent together has been very cathartic.
RT: You mentioned the Peace River region there, which is a recurring subject of the poems in A Family of Dreamers. You write about the region, and the Peace river’s tributary, the Kîskatinâw, with a sense of love, loss and longing. In “kîskatinâw interlude pt. II,” for instance, you write:
she never apologizes
takes you as an offering
and continues to flow…
i wish there were a better way to say
that i am jealous of a river
You write about “working hard in high school because i’m a / cliché of wanting to leave my small town,” and being warned that “you can never come back.” You’ve lived in Vancouver for some time now: have you been able to return to the region? Is this book a return of sorts to both the region and the rivers that sustain it?
SN: This is a very beautiful question. I return home often. In recent years I’ve been trying to return at least twice a year (in the summer and in the winter). Growing up in the north wasn’t easy and along with the deep, deep love I have for it, there is a lot of hurt and grief there. I feel like in a lot of ways this book is an ode to the BC Peace Region, because it really did raise me. But it’s also a way for me to say goodbye to a complicated childhood and teen years so I can let go and discover a new part of myself. There is grief in this, too, and I feel like that comes out in a lot of the poems I write.
For a long time, I held onto being the northern girl who came to the city, but I’ve lived in Vancouver for fourteen years now, nearly as long as I lived in the Peace. I will always be Sam Nock from Dawson Creek, BC but I’m also Sam Nock from Vancouver, BC.
This book let me look at the ways I am healing my child self, my current self, and my future self.
RT: Speaking of letting go of that teenage self, in the poem “letting go” you write about being young and “feeling 13 / and 45 at the same time.” That resonated with me both as the way many of us feel in high school, but also as the natural condition of the poet: a childlike wonder meeting an old soul. Do you still feel like you’re living those two lives simultaneously, even if the years have shifted a bit?
SN: Yes, but now I feel like I’m sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five. There were parts of my teens where I was unsure if I’d see eighteen or twenty or twenty-five. I was severely depressed and struggling. I feel like “old soul” can also be a way to describe kids who had to grow up too fast, and it’s in that way that I felt like I was 13 and 45. It’s also why I feel sixteen, thirty-two, and eighty-five now. This book let me look at the ways I am healing my child self, my current self, and my future self.
RT: Yes, very true. My father died when I was eleven, so maybe that’s what’s at work in this shared feeling of ours, even more so than the poetry.
A Family of Dreamers is full of memorable lines. One that stood out for me was “my spine is my greatest love story” (from “my body remembers”). Could you talk about it a bit?
SN: “my body remembers” is a blunt poem about being sexually assaulted when I was twenty and the ways in which I felt isolated and alone as a scared kid who didn’t know how to process the experience. Through somatic therapy, my therapist asked me during one session where I thought I held my resilience, and I imagined it being stored in my spine. Writing this poem allowed me to look at what happened through a lens of the way my body knew how to keep us going. Even at a time where I felt like my autonomy was stolen, my body was there to remind me that it could never be taken away.
RT: In A Family of Dreamers you use romanized Cree words and phrases within English-language poems, including using the Cree words for the numbers one to six to title your book’s six sections. Unlike many poets in recent years who have integrated Indigenous words into their poems (Jess Housty, Dallas Hunt, Wanda John-Kehewin, etc.), you’ve chosen not to provide a glossary of terms at the back of the book. Could you speak a little about that choice, and what you hope it signals for both Cree and non-Cree readers?
SN: I wanted to be able to put in my poems the parts of my language that I was able to. That it’s limited to certain words and phrases speaks to where my level of language knowledge is at right now. It is an absolute dream to me to maybe one day be able to write a poem fully in my community’s dialect.
I chose not to translate because I wanted non-Cree speakers to stumble on the words, let them feel heavy and awkward in their mouths as they try and sound them out. I wanted them to have to Google the words or phrases and find out what they mean, much like the process a language learner has to go through. For Cree speakers who are familiar or fluent, I wanted there to be parts in there that felt comforting. I know how I felt the first time I got to read a poem with Cree in it; I got so excited and felt welcomed.
Even at a time where I felt like my autonomy was stolen, my body was there to remind me that it could never be taken away.
RT: Your endnotes point to a number of contemporary Indigenous poets whose influence you can see in your work: Selina Boan, Marilyn Dumont, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Dallas Hunt and Jessica Johns. Could you speak a little about your main literary influences in writing this book, either from this list or outside of it?
SN: I would be absolutely nowhere without being in this beautiful constellation of other Indigenous poets and writers. It feels impossible to even name them all. The biggest influences on my work, though, are Marilyn Dumont and Rita Bouvier. Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl was the first time I had read poetry by a Métis woman and in it I saw my family, and my lived experiences, too. Bouvier, who is from Ile-a-la-Crosse and also literally a cousin. I haven’t met Rita in real life but who I sent a very funny message to while writing this book. I was like, “Hey! I think maybe my kokum is your aunty or something like that, anyway we’re related and I love your work.” Her poems are such an inspiration because I feel like through them I am able to connect to family and places that I haven’t been able to connect to in other ways.
RT: You also thank Emily Dickinson, who feels like a natural fit alongside the more “ghostly” and gothic elements of the book.
SN: I’m a formerly pretentious teenager who devoured the works of Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, and Mary Oliver. I feel like they allowed me to dream of poetry. I still return to their work often. But if I’m being very honest, one of the biggest poetry inspirations for me is my dad. He’s a wonderful poet who writes gorgeous pastoral poems about the Peace Region. He doesn’t publish or share his work with anyone but family, but he was the one that taught me that there’s poetry in nature and the places we call home.
Samantha Nock is a Cree-Métis writer and poet originally from Treaty 8 Territory in the Peace Region of northeast British Columbia. Her family is originally from sâkitawâhk ᓵᑭᑕᐚᕽ (Île-à-la-Crosse), Saskatchewan. Samantha currently resides on unceded xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səlilwətaɬ Lands in so-called Vancouver. She has had works published in Maisonneuve, Vice, Prism International, and Best Canadian Poetry, among others.
Rob Taylor’s fifth poetry collection, Weather¸ will be published by Gaspereau Press in Spring 2024. He lives with his family in Port Moody, BC. You can read more of his interviews here.