Conor McDonnell is a physician & poet. He has published two
chapbooks, The Book of Retaliations
(Anstruther Press), and Safe Spaces
(Frog Hollow Press). He received Honourable Mention for The Fiddlehead’s 2018 Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, was shortlisted
for the RawArtReview 2019 Charles
Bukowski Prize, and was runner-up in the Vallum
2019 Contemporary Poetry Prize. His debut collection will be published later
this year. Conor chats fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, and Nick Cave, with
Shazia Hafiz Ramji.
Shazia Hafiz
Ramji: Your
chapbook, Safe Spaces, was published
in 2017 by Frog Hollow Press. How did you land this sweet deal?
Conor McDonell: Hey,
Shazia, I suppose I was very lucky, really. I’m not a networker (in any facet
of my life) so I have always tended to develop close connections with small
numbers of people, and it’s on me to choose those people wisely. Paul
Vermeersch was an early teacher who grew to become a close friend and ongoing
mentor. He introduced me to Jim Johnstone who published my first chapbook with
Anstruther Press and who also grew to be a fierce friend, supporter and mentor.
Shane Neilson is a close colleague of Jim’s and Jim encouraged me to submit my
next project to Frog Hollow Press. Shane was most generous with his time and
energy, we worked closely on the book together, he had me read aloud many times
and made me think about the work from within the work. We also laughed a lot,
over two lines in particular! I enjoyed working with Shane on Safe Spaces and
learned a lot from the experience as was previously the case with Jim and Paul.
SHR: On your
blog, you’ve said that Safe Spaces
“is a collection of lyric poems which explore personal fears and anxieties as
they connect and exist within larger societal trends and schisms.” What are the
fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, at the heart of this beautiful chappie?
CM: Thank you
for the chappie comment, very generous. I suppose I started writing and
publishing at a weird time and place in my life: everything else felt sorted in
many ways - relationships, career, health, etc and yet something always feels
not quite right to me. I have certainly had some bad stuff happen (like most
people), I have reached middle-age and everything from the outside looks rosy
but my job terrifies me on a daily basis because I could legitimately kill
someone if I have an “off-day.” I have gradually come to realize that the wounds
of childhood such as anxiety, grief, night-terrors, PTSD, may sometimes go to
sleep for a few years but eventually come back to assail us. At some point in
developing Safe Spaces it felt that my function (in writing, in my career) was
to publicly declare “yes, I know, this does feel awful,” or, as I say to many
of the children I work with, “it’s okay to be scared, tell me what scares you
most and let’s talk about that first.” Some parents / patients / families are
very uncomfortable with that level of honest engagement so I tend to take the
debris from such moments and place it within a universal set of
images/circumstances that reflect the “fears, anxieties, schisms, trends, at
the heart of this beautiful chappie,” lol. I always hope that someone will read
one of my poems and think, “oh, I’m not alone” but I also know a reader won’t
trust work that doesn’t feel authentic. I believe authenticity either comes
from having lived a thing, or, from having genuine informed empathy for
somebody who has. It’s incredibly important to not feel alone, to not feel
isolated. I suffer from some pretty aggressive anxiety but one thing that helps
me is that I don’t feel alone with my struggles. In my writing I adopt
characters, personae, voices etc where I sense that same struggle and fear and
I try to externalize it, make it more recognizable. I want people to know I’m
open to being part of their conversation so in that regard I try to be more
universal than personal with my poems.
Also,
no small thing, the book eventually became very much about grief and surviving
said state. The book is dedicated to two families, one of which is Nick Cave’s
after the sudden loss of their teenage son in a tragic accident. Cave’s first
album after his son’s death, Skeleton
Tree, was released during the writing of Safe Spaces. I saw him live in
Toronto at this time and had a bit of an out of body co-experience with Cave
himself. I wrote a poem on the way home that night (Better Living Through
Carpentry) and from that point on the book became a treatment of shared grief,
the pain of moving forward and the necessity of experiencing all that comes
with that. I accept now that most of my anxiety emanates from a combination of
grief and anger. I also accepted my physical pain does not always need to be
treated or managed, sometimes it simply needs to be acknowledged, first and
foremost by me. So, I resolved to talk about that, describe that, vivisect
myself with open arms and ears in as honest and creative a way as my meagre
talents would allow; hope that my bones might become a map of sorts, follow any
rib to get to the heart.
I
just now revisited my website where you grabbed that sound-bite and I notice
the next line reads, “These poems address what increasingly goes unsaid by
creating a unique space and voice for each piece to be absorbed.” It occurs to
me that this book snagged between two opposing sentiments: the dedication page
contains a quote from the Cave song, “Skeleton Tree,” which reads “I called out right across the
sea, but the echo comes back empty and nothing is for free.” I think I married
that to something Robin Richardson said the first time we spoke, she said
“please, as an emerging poet, say something.” So, I guess I called out, and in
the face of the deafening silence that greets most poetry releases, I created
some of the responses I needed to hear as well…
SHR: Thank you
for being so candid, Conor. The sense of responsibility you have as a pediatric
anesthesiologist translates to tenderness and authenticity in your poems, and I
can’t thank you enough for it.
I
saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on the same tour as you! Did you see his fan letter to the 10-year-old earlier this
year? I was so moved by it. You said that you hope your poems will make someone
feel less alone and I think this is what Nick Cave has done for this kid,
Ptolemy. I cried seeing that letter, because I did feel like that kid, and I
wished that someone had said that to me – to have the strength to be who you
are, to like what you like, to do what you want to do, from such a young age.
It would’ve made me feel less alone for sure. Would you say writing poems helps
you acknowledge your pain and learn how to live?
CM: Yes,
yes, yes, you’re talking about The Red Hand Files website! That letter was so
moving, and it was incredible that he had already formed a memory of the child
from noticing them in the audience at the previous night’s performance. I find
Cave’s journey, from one which used to make fun of fan-letters on film to the
patient open considerate human being he is now, to be quite inspirational and
it makes me optimistic that people can change. Here is someone we considered to
basically be a murder-balladeer 25 years ago, now he’s the canary for our
humanity as we step into the coal-mine. And, I don’t think this is solely
because of his son’s death, he can barely have started to truly process that. I
think this change is down to two important relationships, that with his wife
who he obviously respects as much as he loves, and Warren Ellis, who has
liberated Cave’s soul through greater exploration of sound than was previously
possible with other iterations of the Bad Seeds. We need people we deeply love
and admire to make us want to be better. I need to tap into that more and start
writing love poems for my wife!
With
regards to writing my poems, I think I’ve nailed the first part in that I
definitely acknowledge my pain; in truth I probably eviscerate myself. I’m not
sure that I have yet acquired the skill of learning how to live from lessons
within my own writing. That’s why Cave’s responses to the Red Hand files are so
astonishing, he has learned to live but also to soothe. I worry that solutions
stare me in the face and I am blind to their possibilities, but I’ve got time,
will and patience and I’m committed to this journey.
SHR: How was Safe Spaces received by the community at
large?
CM: Can I say
I don’t know? I think this is one failing of the community whereby we don’t
talk about each other’s work in much depth. I send people texts, messages,
emails etc and I quote specific poems and lines that have bowled me over (I
know I have done so with Annick MacAskill, Dom Parisien, Dani Couture, I think
it’s how I first engaged with you!) and it’s always a nice opportunity to
engage and chat, but I have to say the response to Safe Spaces was mostly silence. And that is death for me, the only
thing worse than not publishing is delivering new life into a void. Don’t get me
wrong, people have mentioned it in passing, and Jim Johnstone was a sweetheart
and put in a very good mention for Safe
Spaces when making end of year recommendations to the Poetry website in
2017. There are times I think if it wasn’t for “extra-mile” support and
friendship from Jim and Paul and you and Julie Crawford, I might have actually
‘given up’ at the start of 2019. I look back on Safe Spaces as a body of work I’m proud of and a great
collaboration with Shane, but as album titles go I don’t know if it’s my First
Born is Dead or my Kicking Against the Pricks. As I said above, I called out
and in the face of the deafening silence that greets most poetry releases, I
created some of the responses I needed to hear as well…
SHR: I agree
that “extra-mile” support is where the magic happens... I still have your
postcard on my fridge from when Safe
Spaces first came out! Aside from the extra mile and the postcard, though,
I had definitely heard about Safe Spaces
and read it when I got it, and I think it’s a very good chappie. What do you
mean when you say you “created some of the responses you needed to hear”? You
said that before too.
CM: It’s there
in the quote from Skeleton Tree that I mention above, however, I’m not
resilient enough for my own echo to come back empty; not yet. In order to guard
against that I knew I didn’t want this book to be merely illustrative, it also
needed to be transformative, even if that’s ultimately only for me. I may
over-reach here but I’m thinking this is something you achieved in Conspiracy
of Love. Many young Toronto writers have talked to me about how important that
poem is for them, and this is me echoing that back to you if you haven’t
already heard that yourself.
Last
night, at the Red Hand Files show, Nick Cave (am I ever going to shut up about
him?) said, “the worst thing people said to me after my son died was, ‘he’s
still with you, he’s in your heart’, but I couldn’t feel him. It wasn’t until
someone said, ‘take him out of your heart and let him walk beside you’ that I
felt he might still be with me”. So, even though I wrote those poems two-three
years ago, and Cave only said those words last night, I think I was ready to
let those poems leave me but I wasn’t ready to let them disappear. I needed the
poems to feel like a child that’s been well prepared for life by its parent,
“go on ride your bike, you might fall off and I might not be there to catch you
in the moment, but you’ve got enough with you now to cushion the shock until I
get there”.
I
think what I struggle with most at the moment as an ‘emerging poet’ is that
it’s hard to see what’s actually me unless you stand really far back. Then when
you come in close again, if you can get your arms around it that’s me, if you
can’t it’s not truth and I’m still failing at this thing; but I’m trying. Shane
Neilson said, “there’s a lot of falling [falling not failing!] in this book”,
and he’s right, I was in freefall and it shows. But from where I stand, so new
still to this world of words, I think I kinda stuck the landing. I climbed a
few ladders to get this work out there and now I want to get to a higher point
and jump off all over again. Thank you for this, you’re an amazing person. I
truly enjoyed Port of Being and I can’t wait to see what comes next for both of
us. Cx
SHR: Wait wait
wait - YOUR FIRST BOOK IS COMING OUT LATER THIS YEAR. Please tell me about it.
CM: Yes, it’s
called Recovery Community, and it “explores the intimate connections between
deftly-layered moments of trauma, illness and loss.” It’s not as depressing
as it sounds, it’s a bit of a trip through 20th and early 21st century pop
culture that recruits movies, actors, addicts and artists to provide a
Greek-chorus rally-call that re-imagines the way the world has been
(re)presented to us. The Vallum Prize poem from last year, Twin Peaks in under two minutes, is a good example of my work in
this book (http://www.vallummag.com/poem_conor_mcdonnell.html).
I have tried to take what’s familiar through media and art, and give it a new
voice that hopefully encourages readers to revisit / re-imagine older values
and attitudes in a fashion more in line with their own highly evolved lenses
and intuitions. I cut this quote out of an earlier part of our conversation,
“In my writing I adopt characters, personae, voices etc where I sense that same
struggle and fear and I try to externalize it, make it more recognizable. I
want people to know I’m open to being part of their conversation so in that
regard I try to be more universal than personal with my poems.” It was in
reference to Safe Spaces but it
absolutely still applies to Recovery
Community. I ended up being surprised at some of the poems I ended up
leaving out of this book, whether it was due to relentlessness of tone or
losing some long poems in order to allow readers a moment to breathe, relax,
maybe even recover, lol. Hmm, actually now that I think about it, we dropped
the Twin Peaks poem at the last minute too! Still can’t believe I was okay with
that…
SHR:
Sounds genius, Conor! Eagerly awaiting to recover from the apocalypse with your
debut book of poems.
CM: PS
Anesthesiologists ‘recover’ people by waking them up, or, as they in France, réanimation ...
Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry 2019, THIS magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2018, and is forthcoming in EVENT, and Maisonneuve, and Gutter: the magazine of new Scottish and international writing. Her poetry and prose have been nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prizes by Poetry Northwest and carte blanche, respectively. Shazia was named as a “writer to watch” by the CBC. She is the author of Port of Being, a finalist for the 2019 Vancouver Book Award, BC Book Prizes (Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry. She is a columnist for Open Book and is at work on a novel.
