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Armand Garnet Ruffo is from remote northern Ontario and is a band member of the Chapleau Fox Lake Cree First Nation with familial and historical roots to the Sagamok Anishnawbek First Nation. He is recognized as a major contributor to both contemporary Indigenous literature and Indigenous literary scholarship in Canada. His books include Norval Morrisseau: Man Changing Into Thunderbird, and Treaty #, both finalists for Governor General’s Literary Awards. His latest work includes Reclamation and Resurgence: the Selected Poems of Marilyn Dumont (2024), which he edited, and his own book, The Dialogues: the Song of Francis Pegahmagabow, 2024 winner of “The VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres” Award. He currently lives in Kingston and teaches at Queen’s University.
Armand Garnet Ruffo reads in Ottawa on Saturday, November 30, 2024 as part of Fall into VERSeFest.
rm: When did you first start writing?
AGR: High School. I guess it was poetry, although if anyone asked me what I was doing I said I was writing songs, which I’m happy no longer exist. It wasn’t something that I advertised.
rm: What did those first attempts look like? Were they modelled on anything?
AGR: They were muddled. I spent a lot of time, like most younger writers I suppose, just trying to figure it out. Later when I got to York (and then Ottawa U) and was reading widely, and I was basically sounding like whomever I read. Then one day while I was visiting my grandmother who was living with my aunt in Toronto, we got to talking about my studies and for some reason I mentioned poetry. Then out of the blue she recited me a poem that she had written called “Lost In My Native Land.” ( I later published it in a magazine I was working for in Ottawa called The Native Perspective. She was thrilled.) The form was rather archaic, in the style of Pauline Johnson, but the content blew me away. That’s when I realized I needed to write about my heritage and my own experiences. The writing developed from there. You have to remember that back in the 70s there were very few Indigenous people getting published, very few role models. Not like today.
rm: How did you get from there to the publication of your first book? What was the process of putting an eventual manuscript together?
AGR: Getting published was not straightforward. Most of the work I sent out came back to me with the standard responses, too political, too polemical, etc. (I later learned that other Indigenous poets had experienced the same thing.) As for readings I hardly did any. You have to realize it was a period when Canadian nationalism was still in full throttle. The scene was basically unwelcoming, and I even stopped writing for a period in the early 80s. Then in 89 I sent my work to the Banff Centre and to my utter surprise I got in. Adele Wiseman was the Head of writing. I also met Alistair MacLeod there who invited me to study with him at Windsor U. My first book, consisting of mostly earlier poems, was published by Theytus Books in 1994. It should come as no surprise that it took an Indigenous publisher to get the first book out. At the Banff Centre I had met the editors of Coteau Books, and they published my second book Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney, which came out in 1996 and is still in print. The 90s saw a huge shift in the general response to Indigenous writing, and it was a green light from there.
rm: Were there other Indigenous writers you were encountering during this period?
AGR: I guess it was the 80s when started going to hear readings. There was a pretty good poetry scene in Ottawa in those days, as there is today, but I really wasn’t a part of it and, as far as I can recall, there were no other Indigenous writers giving readings either. I do remember giving a reading at a cafe called The Stone Angel with the great songwriter Willy Dunn. That was an honour. Songs such as “The Ballad of Crowfoot,” “Son of the Sun,” and “I Pity The Country” were certainly an inspiration.
At that time I was also writing plays and going to see productions in Toronto by Native Earth Performing Arts. I met Drew Hayden Taylor, Daniel David Moses and Tomson Highway there, but, again, I really wasn’t part of the scene, and I got to know them better in later years at festivals, conferences, etc. As for Indigenous poets in Ottawa, in the early 90s I met Anne Acco, Kateri Damm, Greg YoungIng and Joseph Dandurand. We hung out and even formed a poetry group we called W.I.N.O. (I hope you can see the humour.) Ann Acco provided funding for an anthology we put together, which was published in 1994. I also met the novelist Richard Wagamese, who was living in Ottawa and working on his first book Keeper’ n Me. We would meet for coffee and talk about writing. He was incredibly well read.
During this period, I ended up teaching at The En’owkin Centre in Penticton, B.C. It was a real hub with all kinds of Indigenous writers and artists, either teaching or passing through. Jeannette Armstrong was the Director; Lee Maracle was there; Greg YoungIng was both teaching and editing Theytus Books; Gerry William (a sci-fi writer) was there, as was the Native American poet Maurice Kenny; the poet Annharte visited, etc. So it was an exciting place to be. Once Grey Owl came out things changed for me, and I was invited to do readings both nationally and internationally. I met Marilyn Dumont, Louise Halfe, Garry Gottfriedson, Joanne Arnott, Greg Scofield and Duncan Mercredi, etc. It was an exciting time because Indigenous literature as we know it today was really just getting on its feet.
rm: Grey Owl felt a huge leap in your creative work. What brought you to working that narrative in that particular form?
AGR: I wrote Grey Owl: the Mystery of Archie Belaney because the infamous Archie Belaney lived with my grandmother’s parents in the village of Biscotasing in northern Ontario. I had grown up with stories about him, and I knew I could complicate the telling. As for the writing, I thought initially it was going to be a suite of connected poems at best. However, once I started writing it bloomed into a full book. I did struggle initially with the book’s POV. I tried initially to tell it from Grey Owl’s POV and that didn’t work for various reasons. Then I tried write it using an omniscient narrator, ostensibly the poet’s POV, but it didn’t work either. It felt distant and detached. Then I started to think about how other poets have handled long, narrative poems. I went back and read Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, along with a few Native American poets who were on my bookcase, like N. Scott Momaday, Carter Revard, and Ray Young Bear. As soon as I had a block of uninterrupted time, I just started writing, and once I got into it it actually kind of wrote itself. The multitude of voices seemed to jump onto the page. It’s a gift when that happens.
A few years later after the book was published, I ran into the Metis poet Gregory Scofield, and he told me he had been on a literary jury and Grey Owl came up in their discussion. He said that others on the jury dismissed it because they said it wasn’t, quote, “pure poetry.” I have to laugh when you think about that today. The takeaway is just do your own thing and don’t worry about what others think. The book is still in print nearly 30 years later.
rm: It does seem interesting that Grey Owl is simultaneously a work that holds direct influence from now-canonical works while being well ahead of its time, certainly in terms of structure and content alike. Given you recently won the Betsy Warland Between Genres award, I’d say you’ve been playing with genre for some time now. How aware are you of genre when you are working? How are decisions around structure made?
AGR: We talked briefly about this the other evening. I try not to repeat myself, and in that regard I’m very conscious of genre. That said, I never set out to explore a particular kind of form. Each project takes its own shape. To use a well worn metaphor each project is like a newborn who arrives with its own personality. And to extend that, I don’t create the baby and then give it a personality. I’m really unaware until it cries to be fed. It’s at that moment that I have that “Ahah moment.” Take The Dialogues, I wrote the libretto, essentially a long narrative poem, after about a year of doing research on the life of Francis Pegahmagabow, the famous WWI sniper. And in hindsight I would say it developed rather organically alongside the music. After a few performances I was asked by audience members if I were going to publish it. I thought about it, but the libretto was not written for the page and that presented a problem.
When I imagined it without the music, I saw it full of holes, spaces, absences. I had to fill it up, but how? I came up with the idea to create a dialogue with the libretto that would ‘open it up’ much like the music does on stage. With that in mind, I started to take chunks of the libretto and explore what it was saying, and what I could say about it – and I extrapolated from there. That’s when the whole left side, right side page thing developed. At first I was just trying to get my ideas down, but later it got to a point where I was carefully fitting bits and pieces of multifarious text together. And I soon realized that even the various literary forms of the textual inclusions were in a kind of dialogue with each other. So, yes, as the project developed I became very aware of what I was doing, but only as it developed. E.L. Doctorow famously said that "writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the trip that way.” I agree with him, and I think it’s a hopeful sentiment for any writer, certainly for me, because I really only see glimpses when I’m writing.
rm: You mention working a libretto, but how aware are you, more generally, of sound or visual components as you write? How do you see sound exist upon the page?
AGR: Like many people I grew up listening to music, which I’ve written about it in my poetry collection At Geronimo’s Grave (winner of the 2001 Archibald Lampman Award), and when I’m working I tend to have something playing in the background. Because I can’t listen to anything with lyrics – it messes with the writing – it’s usually instrumental jazz, and in fact I’ve become a huge jazz fan because of it. One of the things that I stress to my students is that when they are writing poetry they should read it aloud to hear and feel the rhythm. So, yes, I’m very conscious of sound value. As I say in the “Afterword” to The Dialogues, when I was writing the libretto I had to feel the words just as one feels music.
rm: You mention The Dialogues emerging out of doing research on Francis Pegahmagabow. How do such projects begin? Do you dig into researching a subject and see what writing might emerge, or have you a particular goal or shape in mind? Are you researching simply through your own interest and curiosity, and writing becomes a kind of secondary process?
AGR: That’s a good question. The libretto was originally commissioned by The Festival of Sound in Parry Sound for the 35th anniversary of the festival. They paired me with Tim Corlis, a classical composer out of B.C., and it was literally our job to come up with a musical about Frances Pegahmagabow. I talked about the process we went through in the book’s Afterword. Suffice to say here that we drove together from Toronto to Francis’ home community of Wasauksing (Parry Island) to meet Francis’ family, and we talked, maybe strategized is a better word, about the project on the trip. Eventually Tim would send me snippets of music, and I would listen to them and write, and sometimes I would send him something. Back to Doctorow’s quote about driving with one headlight; I had a very basic idea of where I wanted to go with libretto in terms of dividing it into three parts, Francis’ early life, the war, and then his political life after the war, but that’s really all I had. After that it was all about feeling the music and letting the poetry come. So, yes, I guess it was about letting the writing “emerge” as you put it. As for the research itself, whether it’s about Grey Owl, or Norval Morrisseau, or Francis Pegahmagabow, it has always been connected to a writing project. There’s always been something in mind.
Miigwech, thanks, for the questions.
