Amy Thiessen interviewed Sharon Thesen
regarding her poem “The Fire,” at the University of British Columbia Okanagan,
March 10th, 2020. The interview appeared as a component of
Thiessen’s English Honours thesis, Sharon Thesen’s “The Fire.”
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| Amy Thiessen and Sharon Thesen |
Sharon Thesen is a poet, editor, and writer who was
based in Vancouver before moving to the Okanagan, where she now lives in Lake
Country. After receiving her MA degree from Simon Fraser University in 1975,
she taught English and Creative Writing at Capilano College in North Vancouver,
and joined UBC Okanagan’s Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies as professor
of Creative Writing in 2005, where she is now the Professor Emerita. She is the
author of 12 books of poetry as well as a number of chapbooks. Her book of poems A
Pair of Scissors won
the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. The
Good Bacteria was a finalist for the
Governor-General’s Award, the ReLit Award, and the Dorothy Livesay Prize; Oyama Pink Shale was a
finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize. Two earlier books also were finalists
for the Governor-General’s Award, and in 2002 Sharon was a member of the
jury—along with American poet Sharon Olds and Irish poet Michael Longley—for
the prestigious Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry. Thesen’s most recent
book The
Receiver was published in 2017 by New Star Books.
Amy Thiessen completed her B.A with honours in
English at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in May 2020. In fall
2020 Thiessen will begin a B.Ed program and start her career as an educator. In
addition to being a student, she is an aspiring writer and amateur musician.
Since 2018 she has been a research assistant and project manager on the
SpokenWeb team at UBCO. Amy has been working closely with Sharon Thesen’s work
since 2018.
Amy Thiessen: Did your process of
writing and publishing “The Fire” change any of your personal feelings,
attitudes, or reactions towards the 2003 Okanagan Mountain Park Fire?
Sharon Thesen: I suppose when one is a writer your process things through
your writing, and that was a very big thing. It was terrifying, of course, and
it was landscape changing. The landscape of your own sense of the beauty of a
place, the reason you came there, the gorgeous summer we were having and
suddenly this hellish thing erupts and changes the beautiful landscape forever
into something very sad and quiet. I’m not the sort of writer who the minute
something happens I have to write about it in a poem; but this seemed to me so
profound and it affected me so profoundly. I was still, like a lot of us where,
in a continued state of delayed shock. There is that kind of shocked feeling
about the poem, I think, when I read it now.
AT:
In the process of writing the poem did you discover more about how you reacted
to the fire than you initially realized?
ST:
Definitely. I used that word processing, which sounds awful, I didn’t mean
that. I think it’s a process of discovering elements of the fire that resonated
with mythology, with my own life, my domestic life, my life with friends and in
a community, as well as my existence within a certain physical environment; all
of it was impacted. Writing the poem really helped to pull a lot of those
threads together. I think that’s one of the things poetry does, is bring things
that seem to be in separate categories of life, or thinking, together. And you
find out they are together, they actually are.
AT:
Something that I have discovered while writing my thesis is a number of
community-collected anthologies of stories and photos and information about the
fire which are community produced and aimed to express this shared experience.
Thinking about that, do you think that poetry has a role in community or
globally experienced environmental crisis?
ST:
I very much think so and believe so. My sense is that the whole area was in a
state of shock and grief for those who had lost homes for a long time after the
fire. I decided to organize a fire reading at the Rotary centre. I don’t know
what possessed me to do that but a friend of mine, my friend June at the time,
who was not in any way a writer or involved with anything literary, and I
decided we would do this. So, I got on the phone and I phoned up the helicopter
companies and spoke to some of the pilots and they agreed. I just wanted people
to come together and talk about their experience of the fire from various
viewpoints. I remember talking to John Lent, he and I met up at the Jammery and
he gave me some ideas for the poster; and he agreed that his band would play at
this event. I don’t know how we pulled this off, I think we even sold tickets.
The room was packed. It wasn’t meant to be writers declaiming to the community
assembled their feelings about the fire. It was anybody who wanted to talk
about it; and they did. I remember people from the English department, [unknown
name: LG] who was teaching then, her house had burned down and she came and
spoke. I invited Patrick Lane to come. He read this fabulous long poem, not
about a fire but a lot of his writing about the Okanagan has a kind of stressed
feeling of psychological/psychosocial anxiety. He sees the landscape in a way
as very unforgiving. So we did that and John’s group played and it was
wonderful. I cannot remember whether I read “The Fire” or if it had even been
composed yet. Anyway, that was one way that I felt at the time, as someone
fairly new to the community but as a writer, that I could provide a space where
people could express their feelings about what had happened.
AT:
Lynn Keller, an ecocriticism/eco-poetry scholar, says that: “Poetry’s
ability to help us grasp the colliding scales of the Anthropocene could prove a
crucial resource for humans now” (Recomposing Ecopoetics, 32). With this
in mind, do you think that your poetry fits within a tradition of eco-poetics
or environmental writing in the way that it can serve as a resource for
populations facing environmental crisis?
ST: I’m not sure if the relationship between cause and effect is that
direct when it comes to poetry and its ability to make more conscious a
situation, in this case an ecological situation. I think it does do that. I
think that because I’m aware of the impact that this poem seems to have on
audiences when I’ve read it. The impact is that people are just sitting there,
kind of, “oh dear”; it has almost silencing effect. Which I think is a good
thing because it means that there is an inwardness, a recognition, a
consciousness happening in the listener. Whether that translates into activism
afterwards? I’m not sure. I think the consciousness created by poetic language
has a curative and wholistic effect on the communal psyche. At the same time, I
feel that’s almost a kind of accident, or beautiful spirit of poetry that can
happen. Poems written to enforce an activism are well-meaning, but I’m not sure
if they last.
AT: What you’re saying is that you imagine that poetry has the
ability to increase readers’ perceptions of their environment? In my experience
reading “The Fire,” the poetry encourages you to pay more attention to the
environment around you and notice how it has changed and how that affects you
personally in a way that not necessarily sparks activism but changes your
attitude towards taking care of the environment.
ST: I agree. It’s the attitude, or experience it invokes in the
listener or reader. Every individual has a different perspective on the
environment and their experience of the environment. It’s sobering, yet there
is an artful, hopeful experience that can arise inside you when you’ve read a
poem that means something to you because it’s taking place in your own
environment and describing something that you know already. There’s a sense of
recognition, and it’s within that larger community of recognition that things
can begin to happen. Maybe not directly related to the poem but to
consciousness.
AT:
Evidenced by you writing “The Fire,” it seems you have spent a significant
amount of time thinking about, and reflecting on, the 2003 fire. Do you think
that the Okanagan community, or beyond the Okanagan, has learnt anything about
how to walk through those types of environmental disasters? Considering that
there have been some semi-major fires that have happened since then?
ST:
No, I don’t. Sorry. I see us just walking the same path of denial and hope.
Just hoping it won’t happen again. Much to the opposite evidence that you see
around you. I think things have to happen again, and again, and again. I don’t
mean that in any wishful or triumphant way at all. Does it help in the long
run? Does it change things? The problem is so large and so complex. It involves
money. It involves land use. It involves legislation. I think in periods of
extreme emergency people are able to pull together and change; but it’s hard
for people to change.
There’s another poem of mine that I had
forgotten about. I ended up reading it while I was visiting Jake Kennedy’s
poetry class. It’s about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. In the poem I’m
citing something I read that happened when she was standing in a line-up
waiting to see if she could give her son—who was in jail, in a political
prison—some food that she had in her pocket. She was talking to a woman who was
standing behind her in the line-up. The woman was just despairing, and she
looked at this line-up and the prison and said to Anna Akhmatova: “Can you
describe this?” And Anna said, “Yes. I can.” And the woman smiled.
AT:
Could you speak to the figure of Mars in the poem?
ST:
When I read that poem the other day, Harvey Weinstein came to mind as the Mars
figure. An idiot director in his Hollywood mansion with his attendees. Again, I
say again because it seems that very frequently in my writing that I invoke an
underworld, a mythological underworld. I name the figures in this underworld
and imagine them doing certain things. In this case I see the figure of Mars
because at the time there was a phenomenon, a celestial-phenomenon, known as
the Mars something-or-other. When the planet Mars either physically approaches
or seems to be very physically close to Earth. In the night sky it’s ginormous,
unusually. The fact that this fire happened at the same time that this Mars
phenomenon was happening is how I got to the planet Mars. Then I took Mars to
another more plutonic realm of Hades because the overall feeling of the fire,
especially at night, was hell on Earth. This kind of work does a trope for the
forces that come together to create these conflagrations.
AT:
Was there an intended, or not, an element of humour in the absurdity of the
fires as Mars is just commanding these things to happen? At certain points I
interpreted it as a kind of dark-humor.
ST:
Yes. There is a cartoon-ish aspect to it and also a kind of scoring against
patriarchy as the ruling mentality that encourages us to not care so much about
the Earth. The figure of Mars there is the uncaring, egotistical—I’m not saying
men are like this—representation of the patriarchal system. I think I say
something about him not caring about the widows and the orphans, that’s an old
kind of biblical reference.
AT:
In the “Sharon Thesen Issue” of the Capilano Review, Nancy Holmes has a
piece about “The Fire.” She observes that in the last three sections Mars
disappears and it’s just focused on the apocalyptic scene of what is left of
the environment. What that intentional? Do you agree with Nancy’s observation?
ST:
Yes, I do. I have to say that I thought that Nancy’s piece was marvelous. The
poem itself follows the dramatic arc of conventional narrative. Where Mars
appears is the crisis, or the horror of it. Afterward it is an aftermath. It is
an apocalyptic scene in the aftermath of the fire. It’s comical, but it’s also
dramatic, a kind of climax or crisis at the height of the fire. It’s out of our
control. It’s in the control of the gods or weather or whatever at that point,
and they’re not very happy with us.
AT:
The Good Bacteria came out in 2006, a significant amount of time has
passed since then. Are there things, if you want to say, that you would change
about or add to “The Fire” seeing how the landscape has changed from 2006 to
now?
ST:
A kind of sequel? Or would I change anything in the poem knowing what I know
now?
AT:
Both parts of that, I suppose.
ST:
I don’t think so. I think the poems stand in its sense of shock and dismay. But
it’s very, very small and tight, a bit shocked itself, and sad. I think to
write from a distance or more critically or looking back I would write a prose
description of what happened. In fact, I sort of did recently. Catherine Owen
has just edited an anthology called Locations of Grief. In it I
contributed a little essay called, “My Friend June” (the woman I mentioned
earlier in the interview who helped me put on the fire reading). June
subsequently died of cancer a couple of years after that. Her symptoms actually
began during the time of the fire. I talk about that in the essay. I also talk
more in the piece about having just moved to Kelowna, and how it was so
paradisiacal. June and I would go down to the lake and swim almost every day
and she was my new friend in this neighbourhood. There was a lot that was going
on. We had just moved there, I was looking for a job, it was a big transitional
moment. Now that I’m talking to you about this I realize that that also informs
a poem. It was this huge transitional moment in my own life coupled with this
terrifying event and afterwards the death of my friend from that period. So, I
think that I would, and I think that I have, filled in some of those spaces in
the memoir/essay that’s in Catherine’s anthology.
AT:
I would like to ask about my favourite piece of “The Fire,” it begins with: I
want the house clean / for the fire: to the greater / scouring I offer the
lesser” (74). This is a very strong motif, or theme, in the community
anthologies that I read. There are some hilarious pieces about people bring
their roasted turkey with them, or feeling like they needed to clean, there was
a very obsessive nature. I was wondering if you could talk about that part of
the experience and this poem.
ST:
That’s great. I think that’s right. I remember going to Rona, or somewhere like
that. And I thought, “oh, well what should I get? I guess I should get some
flashlights.” I became obsessed with darning a sock or something, and was I
going to get some more needles? The person across the street made sure their
garbage was taken out. Everybody was carrying on. This domestic life you wanted
to keep going in some kind of magical way that somehow this would deflect the
fire. You go a little crazy, really. When you look back on it it’s not
rational. But you were not in a rational frame at the time with that bearing
down upon you. At that time that was the first big fire that we had
experienced. I’d never experienced anything like that in my life before. That
was true for a lot of people in this neighbourhood we were in. We felt
embarrassed that we were living in this new subdivision. It wasn’t our style to
live in a new subdivision. But everybody else was in the same boat they were
all dazzled by these new houses we had, and we thought, “well we don’t want
them all to burn down.” I’m sure there are lots of stories like that and of
people packing strange things that they wouldn’t normally think would be
appropriate to take with you. It’s impossible to re-experience something like
that. You couldn’t. You have to have been there at the time. I was making sure
the house was so tidy and clean. I didn’t want to; I was in total denial like
we all were. Gee, maybe I should get a few things ready just in case. Going
around in this horrible business of choosing what you’re going to save. You see
this cute little cushion sitting there and think, “well, I don’t think I can
save you.” It’s an awful feeling.
AT:
Thinking about that now. Does it stand out to you that it felt like that was so
absurd at the time? Or do you dwell more on the fact that many people only
ended up with what they took with them?
ST:
I think so and I think that’s what happens every time. We came close a few
years ago there was a fire in Jack Seaton Park, which is practically adjacent
to where we live. And again, complete irrationality took over all of us. We
just all sat out on our deck and didn’t do anything. I remember taking the
cat—something in you is telling you that this is serious—and so I took the cat
to a cat-boarding kennel. They ended up having to evacuate and take all these
cats to some other place. Thinking of it now you’d think, “okay if this every
happens again this time I’ll know what do you” or “I’ll be better prepared,” but
you aren’t. I guess some people are. They’re probably of a different
personality type than me. I always feel now that every hot summer I’m very
nervous and agitated. It’s traumatizing. This is something that I think about:
an entire city traumatized. An entire citizenry with PTSD. And this is
happening all over. Think of Australia now, think of California. So many people
with symptoms of PTSD following these disasters whether their fires, or floods.
How do people cope? Well, in the usual ways, I suppose, that aren’t very
healthy.
AT:
I think that something like the fire reading that you hosted could have much
more of a positive impact than you probably could have ever anticipated for
people who maybe don’t realize that they have gone through a trauma or who
don’t realize that they are not overacting to how they feel.
ST:
Yes, I agree. It was just a kind of instinct that I had that I thought we need
to get together. And in an actually formal kind of way people can stand before
others and describe their experience. If they were writers, that was great, but
they didn’t have to be, like the helicopter pilot. We were all mesmerized by
what he was saying. I think it’s a big mistake for people to just try go back
to their lives and recreate them somehow or carry on without communal
processing of the trauma.
AT:
Are there any burning things that you wanted to say that we haven’t talked
about yet?
ST:
No, nothing burning. I brought this yellow-lined pad because I remember
starting to write the poem as I did in those days. I wrote my poems by hand on
the yellow-lined pads and then transferred them first, before computers, to a
typewriter where I’d type it out and edit it as I was typing. And the same
thing with, I think we called it then, a word processor; this thing sitting on
my desk. I remember sitting where my study was in this house that fortunately
did not burn down, very fortunately. The wind shifted at the last minute.
Interestingly enough it was the Winfield fire department who were there—and now
I live in Winfield—trying to save our houses until they just have to leave.
Then the wind shifted and went a burned down Crawford. We were right in
between. Anyway, I was sitting in this little study I had, and I remember there
was a red sofa in the corner. And this yellow pad. And writing this poem in
what for me at the time were shorter lines. In a way, returning to a really
early poetic voice that I had that was also kind of scared. That’s all I
remember. I think that’s maybe one of the things that happens with these
events. You don’t remember a lot of things.