You Are Your Own Landscape: An Interview with Onjana Yawnghwe

The following interview is part six of an eight part series of conversations with BC poets. All interviews were conducted by Rob Taylor.

---

Evening Prayer

Between sleep and dream
from the pull of mouth muscle
the twitch of tongue,
into the hum of throat,
down to the column,
solid heart, of self

Buddha saranam gacchami

The nights we climbed
into mom’s bed
sleep tip-toeing

Dhammam saranam gacchami

we would repeat until
the lone-lamped room
rose and filled with
level, deep rumblings
of a language we lost
and didn’t understand

Mouths memorising
mouth-shapes

Sangham saranam gacchami

Remember not the meaning
but the feeling of those words

Reprinted with permission from We Follow the River (Caitlin Press, 2024)

---

Rob Taylor: On its back cover, We Follow the River is described as “a work of over twenty years.” My sense is that the initial writing of many of these poems was connected to your father’s death in 2004, and your return to them spurred by your mother’s death in 2022. Would that be accurate?

Onjana Yawnghwe: The initial manuscript of We Follow the River took shape and gained purpose with my father’s death—I was in my twenties, and the timeline from the diagnosis of a brain stem tumour to his death was an interval of less than four months (though in lived experience it felt endless), and it was all very baffling in my mind. I just remember being so confused. I think there was so much shock—and it was, in all honesty, a terrible death to witness—that many memories of that time were entirely absent or just blank. My father’s death became a very deep wound, and writing about it helped me make sense of it (it also caused me to eventually go back to school to study nursing). 

Alternately, my mother’s death was a surprise—I came home from work past midnight and found her sitting on the couch, looking like she was sleeping—but she had been struggling for a few years with dementia. Compared with my dad, hers was a much more peaceful death. 

RT: Those both sound very difficult. And as someone who lost his father young and now has a mother many years into a dementia diagnosis, you have my sympathy and my understanding that while the shocks may get a bit easier to take, they are still shocking. I’m curious if, and how, you’ve processed these two losses differently. 

OY: Age certainly changed the way I received death. As we grow older, death certainly becomes more present in our lives and the lives of our friends. There is a kind of acceptance of the inevitability of death, our own mortality, and the fact that we, as living beings, are destined to lose our loved ones, one by one. But not only is there acceptance, there is also consideration of the beauty of life, its fragility and our own complete vulnerability. With regards to my own parental losses: when it came to my father’s death, I wanted to forget, but with my mother’s recent death, I wanted to remember.

RT: I was struck by an image you provide in one of the poems in We Follow the River: grief as water in a river (“the heart / breaks / upriver”) which travels its set course but eventually spills out into the ocean; into everything. How did the fact that the ocean was already filled with grief influence how you received this new loss from “upriver”?

OY: The river/ocean imagery emerged naturally out of the book. I’m drawn to bodies of water. I think of our family crossing the Pacific to settle in Canada. I think of our proximity to the same ocean when we lived in Mount Pleasant, often visiting Stanley Park on weekends. I remember staring at the ocean as a child and being riveted by its rhythms. When we moved to Coquitlam when I was a teenager, our kitchen window had a distant view of the vast Fraser River. I heard the underlying roar of traffic which seemed to me similar to the sound of a river rushing past. 

It is important for grief to become like a river, always kind of moving and flowing, allowing emotions to pass and evolve versus having them fossilized and fixed into place. And of course I see the ocean as full of grief: the sea as being full of tears (see the song “Tiny Tears” by the Tindersticks), but what is lovely is that these are tears from each and every one of us, our collective grief, which serves as a kind of reminder that everyone who’s human has gone through or will go through loss, which is comforting, in a way, to know that you are not alone in this.

RT: Yes, lovely. And that you’ve chosen to approach that grief, that ocean, in poetry. Miroslav Holub once described poetry as “almost the instinct against death crystallized,” and Ted Hughes once said, “poetry is a way of talking to your loved ones when it’s too late.” Do either of these quotes ring true to you in thinking about the writing of this book?

OY: Yes, these quotations very much resonate with me, though I don’t see the act of writing as a movement against death; resisting death is like resisting the sun or the rain—potentially interesting (at times worthwhile in the effort) but mostly futile. Writing and art are ways to remember someone who has died, a kind of reimagining of them, a way of organizing memories and feelings you’ve had with the dead. It’s impossible to remember someone as they exactly were—after all, there are so many different ways of knowing a person that you only have one part of who they were—but it is a retelling of the person in a way that will honour them in the most unique way that you knew them. Writing is a way for someone to exist in another person’s imagination, even if briefly. I really like the idea that readers of this book will get to know my mother even a little bit, and since she was a very social person who loved talking, it tickles me to think that she’ll be spending time with people she didn’t even know through this book.

It is important for grief to become like a river, always kind of moving and flowing, allowing emotions to pass and evolve versus having them fossilized and fixed into place.

RT: Ha! Chatting away in the literary afterlife. Can we talk a bit more about how we remember people? Large portions of We Follow the River document your family’s exile from Burma to Thailand, and subsequent move to Canada, all of which happened before you turned eight years old. In your long poem “Moving Earth,” you write “as long as I’m touching earth I’m planting home // seeding memories, even those that are not my own.” 

Did you feel a responsibility, in writing this book, to get “right” your parents’ memories, even though, as you say, there is likely no such thing? It feels like a daunting task (it’s hard enough to try to wrangle one’s own “truth” onto the page). Was this, perhaps, part of the reason for the long-laboured writing of the book?

OY: I definitely have no illusion that I’m getting anything right in terms of what my family went through, and it’s my default belief that whatever I write about our family and their memories is inherently slanted in some way. (That being said, I’m working on a graphic memoir/history of the family and Burma that is a sort of non-fictional text!) 

I didn’t feel a pressure with this book, but I did feel that it was important to get at an emotional truth that was authentic to my own experiences. I think that’s sort of the freedom in poetry—there is little expectation to get things “right,” only to get things to feel true. I don’t know exactly what my mother felt coming to Vancouver, or what my dad experienced in Chiang Mai feeling like his life was in danger; I can only imagine. Writing about my parents was a way to get out of my own head, an exercise in empathy and creation, a sort of “negative capability,” as Keats would say. I’m writing about myself, but not really—I’m putting on the page ideas that branch out and become larger than myself, a self that, after all, is an insignificant thing given the scope and nature of life itself.

RT: Many writers have waited to publish autobiographical books until after one or more family members has died, sometimes because they know that person would be uncomfortable with the attention and/or the author finally feels able to speak freely (I doubt that was the case with your mom!). Other times it’s because the loss sharpens the author’s attention, and sense of urgency, to remember and record. In many cases, I suspect, it’s a mix of all these things. 

In your acknowledgments, you note that after your mother’s death in 2022 “it seemed time to put the poems out into the world.” Could you tell us a little more about that instinct to publish the book now, and not earlier or further down the road?

OY: First of all, I feel no caution with regards to writing about a living person I’ve known (as long as it’s done sensitively I suppose), so that wasn’t a factor. I sort of feel art is fair game. Living is the material of art, after all.  

The thing about this book’s twenty-plus-year journey is that I’d given up on it many, many times. When I first finished the manuscript all those years ago, I felt a lot of hope for it. I sent it around, and no publisher wanted to take it on. Then I put it away, then returned to it after a year or two, revised it, sent it off to a couple places unsuccessfully, then repeat. Again and again. I eventually figured it must be complete crap and abandoned it. It became a sort of ghost. 

After my mother died in 2022, I was thinking about her memorial and I remembered the poems I’d written about her and, well, I was very into my solitude at that time, and I felt the most alone I ever had, and the house was a mess with all the decluttering I was doing, and I figured let’s look at the old manuscript. It had been years since I’d read it, and I had forgotten a lot of the poems. So what I reread surprised me, and I found it worthwhile. What was interesting was that I found that I instinctively knew how to revise and refine and reorganize the book to make it a lot more cohesive. And I thought, why not give it one more go at it having a life? Luckily, the publishing world had changed in the intervening years; diverse voices were more present in the literary world than they ever were. I thought the book finally had a chance. My publisher, the wonderful Vici Johnstone of Caitlin Press, accepted it right away. 

It was important that the book come out sooner than later—it had been so long, and I felt I had squandered the time I had with all my insecurities about it over the years. I do wish the book had come out while my mother was alive; I feel sad that neither of my parents are here to see this book get published, but then again, it was my mother’s death that compelled me to return to the book in the first place…. 

RT: What did returning to, and rehabilitating, these poems teach you about your mother, and about yourself, which you’d perhaps forgotten in the intervening twenty years?

OY: Tenderness, I think. Coming to these poems in my middle age brought a sort of sadness and knowledge about the nature of the world. I have so much more compassion for what my parents went through, and how insanely brave they were, and how in many ways, life must have been a disappointment with all their losses, and yet they persisted and tried very hard to make a good life for my brother and me. I don’t think I fully understood that twenty years ago. Life is difficult, and we live blindly with little glimmers of other lives in the distance. When I think of my parents the way they were, coming to Canada in their forties with two children, I just want to embrace them and love them and tell them that they tried their best, and that it is very, very okay. 

In terms of the craft of the poems, what I learned about myself was how skilled I’ve become at writing, which actually surprised me. I felt like a musician who’s played their instrument for decades and knew exactly what notes to hit and how to hit them to achieve certain effects. So revising these poems was a sort of joyful experience of exercising all that I learned about line, diction, music, and space. It was technical, acute, and incisive. 

Writing is a way for someone to exist in another person’s imagination, even if briefly.

RT: What about you as a child to these two people? Did you find yourself revising what you had once said about them, from your new vantage point as someone similar in age to them when they moved to Canada?

OY: I don’t think I was a difficult child from an outsider’s perspective—I didn’t get into trouble and always did well in school—but do think I was a challenging child. I was very shy and withdrawn, I never spoke in public, and all I did was stay home and dream. Our parents left us alone for much of the time, so I came to appreciate solitude and learned how to occupy myself. But as a teenager and young woman I was so, so angry; I learned I could hurt with words. I was super broody and intense. I thought my parents could have done a better job with us—they were so strict, and there was no affection, and sometimes our father was harsh with us. But I think as I moved away from them, I eventually began to see them as people who were just trying to survive in this strange place and whose dreams disappeared literally overnight after catastrophic violence. 

When I was 18, I left for a backpacking trip through Europe that I had spent years at my summer job saving up for. I remember being at the airport gate and looking back at my parents and noticing how frail they looked, and it dawned on me that they were going to die someday. This made me immeasurably sad. A few years later, on a Greyhound bus from Vancouver to Quebec, I started reading Peace is Every Step by the Zen Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, and as if by miracle, all my anger and resentment from growing up kind of just slowly faded. I can’t imagine taking the risks as they did when they were approximately my age. They made big choices that I didn’t have to make. And looking back, I think our parents leaving my brother and I to our own devices worked out pretty well; both of us developed rich inner lives, and we fed ourselves with art, books, and ideas. It can be hardly a coincidence that my brother, Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (who created the painting on the cover of this book) is a visual artist and I’m a writer. 

RT: You mentioned a while ago how the publishing landscape has changed since the mid-2000s, when you first tried to publish an earlier version of this book. One of those changes, perhaps obviously here, is the elevation of more stories from the lives of immigrants and refugees. When reading We Follow the River, I thought particularly of a book like Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Found, published around the time you would have first been preparing this manuscript, or, more recently, books on growing up split between languages and cultures, such as Isabella Wang’s Pebble Swing, Gillian Sze’s Quiet Night Think or Sadiqa de Meijer’s alfabet/alphabet. 

While acknowledging, of course, that all inspiration need not be from those with similar life experiences, I’m curious which writers inspired you to initially write these poems in the early 2000s?

OY: Interesting you bring up Thammavongsa—I remember encountering her first book Small Arguments in 2003, and feeling an odd resonance, because here was a poet, who was around my age, from the country I was born. It was incredible, because nearly all of the Asian Canadian writers I knew of were of East Asian descent, but here was a South East Asian poet—from Thailand no less! Not only that, her work wasn’t explicitly about her race or identity or belonging. I loved Small Argument’s minimalist, expansive poems, and I liked that she had the guts to publish a work that wasn’t a sort of self explanation (nothing wrong with that, obviously, but it felt different to me). I admire Found because of its sense of withholding. She is writing about her father and his notebook, and writes about it, but doesn’t reveal much of its content. It’s defiant and risky—a hell of a way to tell a family/ethnic narrative without spilling one’s guts about every racial trauma.

Growing up, the writers I studied in school were all White, and it was only until I came to university that I was exposed to Black, Indigenous, Asian writers. That being said, I fell in love with classic literature, and that included those classic White writers, like Whitman, Dickinson, and Keats; I mean, I loved English literature enough to do a Master’s degree in it. As for the poets that shaped my writing in the early 2000s, there have been many: Dionne Brand, Marilyn Dumont, Jeannette Armstrong, Fred Wah, Phyllis Webb, Betsy Warland and Wayde Compton to name a few. For the music of poetry I was influenced by Galway Kinnell (a book I was obsessed with was his The Book of Nightmares) and Dylan Thomas (his music is unmatched). I was particularly entranced by the idea of the long poem, and the idea that a poetry book doesn’t have to be a collection of poems, but one whole narrative, so I was impressed by Louise Bernice Halfe’s Blue Marrow, all of Anne Carson’s books, and Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid and Running in the Family.

RT: Yes, yes! What a wonderful assortment of poets to have come to early in your writing life. Did other poets come along in the intervening years who helped inspire the revised book we see today?  

OY: I’ve found inspiration in Claudia Rankine (both Citizen and Just Us) who uses mixed essay/poetry forms to delve into the microaggressions and intricacies in race and culture, and Ocean Vuong, who has a deeply lyrical and beautifully tender voice. I enjoy the language and music of Billy Ray Belcourt and Jordan Abel’s Empty Spaces, and the distilled essences in Ali Blythe. I love the simplicity and openness of Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit. I love the essay forms that Maggie Nelson writes. Poetically, T.S. Eliot remains a perpetual influence.

I think that’s sort of the freedom in poetry—there is little expectation to get things “right,” only to get things to feel true.

RT: I see many of those poets in your work, and perhaps will be seeing others more clearly in future books. 

Returning to this idea of “seeding memories, even those that are not my own,” one can also read that line in the opposite direction, not looking back at family memories, but looking forward to readers and their own remembrances, especially those readers whose families were forced to leave their home countries. I can see this book drawing up all sorts of memories in its readers. Was the reader, and the space you were making for them to seed their own memories, a consideration for you as you wrote or revised this book?

OY: The reason a lot of us write is to share stories and communicate experiences. I know that what I’m writing isn’t a unique narrative at all, that there are variations of my story that echo in others’ experiences. Your idea of seeding memories in readers is a very beautiful one. There is a commonality to immigrant experiences, especially people turning away from their home countries and starting anew. We face similar difficulties, especially with questions around belonging and how to be in a new land that seems ambivalent of our presence. So I do hope that We Follow the River becomes a kind of welcoming to those folk who feel they don’t necessarily fit in much of anywhere, and who feel alone and isolated. 

That being said, I want to emphasize the immense variation and diversity in Asian immigrant experiences, and being Asian Canadian; these stories tend to be lumped into one narrative by the dominant culture, or as Cathy Park Hong writes in her wonderful book of essays Minor Feelings, “Of course, writers of color must tell their stories of racial trauma, but for too long our stories have been shaped by the white imagination,” and “non-white writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain.” 

Personally, I have struggled with writing racial identity politics because yes, it is what the dominant culture expects, and these narratives traditionally have taken on similar, familiar and comforting shapes: the accepted shapes, the non-threatening shapes. As Christina Sharpe says in the excellent Ordinary Notes, “stories are not innocent” and “what kind of consciousness is being shaped? Whose? How?” It’s so difficult to navigate racialized narratives—one can almost get trapped in these stories with no room to maneuver. At times, we find ourselves building our own narrative cages. I ask myself: what stories are being rewarded, what narratives are given more spotlight than others, and why?

As an Asian-Canadian writer, I can’t help but write about my own racialized and immigrant/refugee identity because it is such an integral part of who I am, but a part of me has also resisted this urge. It’s sort of been an ambivalent push and pull. (My first two books were about love, for goodness’ sake, and I have an unpublished book of poetry about Buster Keaton, of all things.) 

I think, how wonderful would it be if a writer of colour can have the freedom to write whatever they want—whether it be love poems, or sci-fi or literary fiction—without carrying the burden of their race or ethnicity. Without the need to represent a people or culture. On the other hand, how amazing that more and more writers of colour, and queer writers, and other writers who have traditionally been in the background are telling their stories. I guess what I’m saying is that I hope these voices are encouraged to tell whatever stories they want to tell, regardless of expected ethnic or racial narratives.

RT: Yes, wonderfully put. I hope for that, too. And I want to read that Buster Keaton book!

At the centre of We Follow the River is a poem entitled “Vancouver City Map.” The poem “maps” the city’s history of arrivals and exclusions, from George Vancouver, to Chinese railway labourers, to the Komagata Maru. Why was it important for you to include this poem in the book?

OY: It was important in this book to expand the lens. There is so much inward gazing and looking back, but it’s important to place an individual in her context, and placed within her world. Also, expanding one’s view is necessary in expanding one’s own identity. So in including “Vancouver City Map” I was situating myself. It’s work to negotiate who you are in the context of where you are. It’s important to find that “You Are Here” ideolocator in the map of yourself, see the lay of the land, see where you are so you can know where you’re going.

Also, I think there is that common narrative in our Western culture: immigrants coming from a less fortunate land to a more fortunate, advantageous one, making a new life, being grateful. It is important to realize that Canada has its own problems, especially in dealing with Indigenous folk and people of colour, and that there has been and still is systematic racism here, with profound impacts of colonization and imperialism that are still at play to this day. 

The book moves around geographically quite a lot, from Burma to Thailand to Canada and Italy, yet in the end, the only constant is that you are with yourself, and you end up with the same questions, you know? You are your own landscape, no matter where you end up on a map.

RT: I love that! The landscape, or perhaps soundscape, of you in We Follow The River involves a mix of languages, chiefly Shan, Thai, and English. In the aforementioned alfabet/alphabet, Sadiqa de Meijer wrote that “the sound of Dutch exists like a faint carbon shadow in my English.” You write something similar in your poem “Learning”: “I hear the vague ghost / of my own voice speaking Thai and Shan.” 

de Meier believes Dutch is still a “major sonic current” in her writing, while in “English Lesson” you write that English “gives me life and swallows me up.” This seems to suggest that Thai and Shan may be less active influences in your poetry. Do you hear that ghostly presence of Thai and/or Shan in the poems in this book? Is some legacy of those languages present in what you think of as “poetic” sound or structure?

OY: At its heart these two poems refer to the unique feeling that many immigrants who’ve come to a new country as young children have. There is a profound problem of language and, along with it, identity. Those who immigrate between the ages of six and twelve are referred to by sociologists as the 1.5th generation immigrant. So the problem is one of being in between: in between cultures, languages, lands. 

My family was a little different—my parents were multilingual, speaking English, Shan, Burmese, and Thai. Burma had been a British colony from the nineteenth century until the end of World War II, and my father’s family went to English-run schools and were entirely fluent in the language. I was born in Thailand, and Thai and Shan were my mother tongues, and I started school full-time in Chiang Mai at the age of three. When we came to Canada our parents forbade us to speak Thai or Shan (a common immigrant survival strategy to better assimilate to the dominant culture), and it worked: I forgot my native languages. (From my parent’s perspective, I imagine there was a lot of trauma from the military coup in 1962 and subsequent waves of genocide in Burma.) 

We were so culturally isolated at that time: no family and no other Shan families in Vancouver. Growing up, I knew no one from my culture. That is to say, the loss of language has been a profound source of shame for me. There was certainly self-hatred (both racial and the ordinary kind). I felt a profound disconnection, felt sort of like a fraud in Thai society, in Shan society, in Canadian society, everywhere I went. I really envy people who have knowledge of their ancestral language—I imagine they can access a kind of knowing that a person like me wouldn’t ever have.

The thing is, I do think the Thai and Shan languages are still woven into my fabric somewhere, whether it’s just a background like the sky or a backdrop that you don’t really notice. What sticks with me is the music of the languages, their particular tones and melodies. I think there is a lyrical, musical quality in my work that is due to my exposure to the sounds of various languages when I was young (Vancouver is a great place for this kind of music as well). I hear Shan in my dreams sometimes. I still understand a bit, Shan more than Thai, because it was how my mom spoke to me, especially in her later years (she actually encouraged me to speak Shan when I was an adult, but by then, it was much too late—I had forgotten how to bring forth those words, the disconnection complete). Strangely, I understood her perfectly when she spoke to me in Shan, even when I couldn’t understand other people speaking the same language. It makes me sad to think that the language (the version of Shan from my mother’s mouth), will now be forever lost to me.

I don’t know where the work comes from, or the nature of inspiration, but I think I know to let the self, my ego, get out of the way of the work. To allow the work to just be what it wants to be.

RT: That doesn’t seem strange to me, and I’m so sorry for that loss—one among many. In the book, you make a return to Chiang Mai to help reconnect some of those lost connections. You write about returning to your old home in Chiang Mai after twenty years and feeling like “an elephant in a doll house.” Could you talk about that experience a little?

OY: It was a weird time. Growing up, we never returned to Thailand as a family—we could never afford to go on vacation—and it was only when I had finished my Master’s degree, around the age of twenty-four, that I returned to Thailand on my own for about six weeks. I don’t know what I’d expected. I think I’d been trying to find something, because I’d felt so unsettled in Canada. I thought I would feel at home when I returned to Thailand. But I didn’t; I felt so foreign, but also not foreign enough to make friends with fellow travellers who assumed I didn’t speak English. I was mistaken for Thai a lot, but I couldn’t read the language, couldn’t properly speak it. Those were mostly solitary days of travel, often getting lost, feeling hot and sweaty, but eventually settling into a comforting rhythm of sight-seeing in the morning, buying food, then returning to the hotel room for an afternoon nap when the sun was at its strongest. 

During the trip, I met up with my dad in Chiang Mai for a few days, because he was coincidentally there for work. (It’s a bit odd to think back how the four of us in the family never travelled with each other, but always separately, on our own.) I saw old family friends who eventually took me back to our old house, where we were allowed inside. It was disorientating, being back there—I had sort of a doubling of experiences, of myself as a six-year-old, and of my adult self, and these could not be reconciled. I felt a lot of loss. I realized that the version of myself left behind all those years ago was gone. That trip was when travelling started to lose its bloom on me, I think. I felt so strange, so out of place, and this surprised me, but I missed Canada. I missed the evergreens, I missed the air, I missed the English language. 

RT: Did you have a similar feeling, returning to some of these poems after twenty years, that the home they’d once been had changed? If so, what did the remodeling of those “houses” entail?

OY: The manuscript went through a lot of changes. I got rid of many, many poems and trimmed it heavily. I bulldozed sections of poems, cleared things out, pulled them apart and put them back together again. When I first started writing these poems I was such a passionate, fervent person about writing. Writing was my everything, it was the most important thing in my life. I was a kind of poetic acolyte, completely devoted. And I was so precious with my work—it was a pain to even consider changing a line or getting rid of elements that didn’t work, and critical feedback was a stab wound. I was very, very enthusiastic, but probably too single-minded. Twenty plus years on, I have more of a balance; I’m a lot less exciting as a person but probably a little wiser and more measured.

I now have more of the mind of a craftsman, knowing how to use tools to make and discard the unnecessary. I guess if one were to envision a house, it would be one that was still beautiful, but functional and harmonious, instead of a mess of amazing decorative ideas. What is important to me is the work, and allowing the work to be what it wants, which requires a lot of attention and listening. I don’t know where the work comes from, or the nature of inspiration, but I think I know to let the self, my ego, get out of the way of the work. To allow the work to just be what it wants to be. 

RT: Some of the poems in We Follow the River were among your earliest publications, such as the aforementioned “English Lesson” in the 2008 anthology Rocksalt, and “Moving Earth” in 2009’s 4 Poets (both published by Mona Fertig’s Mother Tongue Publishing). It was interesting to compare the early versions of the poems to those in your new book. I noted that you didn’t change the wording of the poems much, but you did a lot of work on their spacing: adding more stanza breaks, spaces between words, and indentations. What motivated you to make these changes? Are these examples a good representation of your evolving feelings around pauses, blank space, and/or breath in your poetry?

OY: I think so. When I started writing everything was left indented, because that was what I had seen in books, but the more I got exposed to poetry, the more I was inspired by different forms, and particularly the way spacing, line breaks, or lack of grammar would feel like a little bit of resistance to tradition or dominant modes of thinking and being. It was only until I met writer Betsy Warland (who was an instructor for a poetry workshop at the writing retreat Sage Hill that I attended twenty years ago), that I learned how the page was a sort of visual score for poetry, and that words and the blank spaces marked breath and sound. It was pretty revolutionary for me. This was made even more powerful by listening to Betsy read her poems (she’s a powerful reader, with so much presence and being present, giving the time for each word or line) because I saw how her reading performance was reflected in how the printed page looked. 

I think every time I went back to the poems, I read them out loud, and sort of tweaked how I felt they should have sounded, and tried to reflect that on the page. I also like the gesture of openness on the page, how we sometimes visually move from more conventional looking lines to disassembling into a kind of freedom, sort of like the feeling when you’re divesting yourself of work clothes after a long day, or when you finally step into a forest after a long time in the city.

---

Onjana Yawnghwe is a Shan-Canadian writer and illustrator who lives in the traditional, ancestral, and unceded lands of the Kwikwetlem First Nation. She is the author of two poetry books, Fragments, Desire (Oolichan Books, 2017), and The Small Way (Dagger Editions 2018), both of which were nominated for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She works as a registered nurse. Her current projects include a graphic memoir about her family and Myanmar, and a book of cloud divination.

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.