David O'Meara, the newly appointed English-language poet laureate for the City of Ottawa and author of the debut novel Chandelier, speaks with Nick Thran, whose works include If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display and the upcoming poetry collection Existing Music. Together, they explore the inspirations behind their latest works and the influences that shape their writing.
First off, congratulations on publishing your first novel, Chandelier. You’re both a poet and a playwright, so genre-hopping is not new for you. You’ve talked a little bit with rob mclennan on this site about the novel offering you “a different way [than in poems] of talking through the paradoxes” and about getting to moving through a prosaic trajectory of causal relations. But I’m wondering if there was some kind of hinge moment when the lark of the novel became the work of writing the thing, and a three-hundred-page family drama felt possible? Can you talk about this moment? Or was it an idea borne more gradually, in increments?
Frankly, I learned many things from abandoning an earlier novel I wrote before Chandelier. I wanted to apply that knowledge and experience; I just needed a story. And when I was in the editing stages of my last book of poems, the image of Hugo, the father / ex-husband character in the novel, waiting impatiently for a connecting flight and receiving a phone call from the police, imbedded itself in my head, and I thought what the F, let’s see where this goes. So, it started as an image that interested me. But it needed to be a character that interested me. And as I worked on that, essentially making him an architect on his way to a conference to confront a professional rival, the other characters developed into a compelling drama. The things I learned from the previous failed novel came into play. Essentially: plan almost nothing, create interesting people and let them get into trouble.
I want to ask a similar question regarding your book of essays, If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display. How did it form? I can see that maybe it grew incrementally, except that there seems to be a very coherent exploration of enquiry through art and aspiration (and I’ll get to that later). What was the process like for gathering the material together?
I admire this capacity to move a particular character through a single evening, to have them make decisions, situation to situation, on the fly.
If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display grew from two manuscripts. For a few years I’d been working on both a manuscript of essays and a manuscript of poems. In the essays I’d established a difficult but exciting (until it wasn’t) set of formal and thematic constraints. The poetry manuscript was open-ended and going nowhere. I was also working a Sunday shift at my local bookstore where my sole task, apart from slow Sunday retail, was to group different books together on the tables for display. After I hit a creative block with both manuscripts, I’d say the display work felt more satisfying than any of the writing I was doing. Next thought, can I write a book that feels like this, whose parts mimic the kind of associative leaps I sense going on here at the shop? This opened the door for fiction enter the conversation, which quickly established a leading role, as the stories drove through many of the roadblocks I was encountering in the essays. A role for the poems suddenly appeared. The three genres thrived side by side.
Returning to your work, the three members of the broken family who are the subjects of Chandelier, daughter Georgia and her parents Hugo and Sarah, have a few things in common. They’re prone to wild or risky excursions. They struggle with substances. But I’m interested in ways the three are bound by the largesse with which certain individuals outside the family unit – Georgia’s friend Natalie, Hugo’s career-rival Alan Norcock, and, for Sarah, the double-first-named scammer Trevor Brent – loom in each of their present realities. I wonder if you can tell me about the decision to have each of these characters reckoning with the actions or absences of individuals outside of that family?
Nick, I have a very messy proto-essay in my files regarding the idea and use of advice by characters in the history of novels. Advice is a very fraught concept. We give and get it every day. Our fate, for good and bad, often hinges on whether and how we apply it. Secondary characters operate somewhere in this sphere, I think. Very broadly, main characters battle their past and present, its great mistakes and regrets, predictably inside their embattled psyche. But the secondary characters, even minor characters, apply the unpredictable left hook. They have access to protagonists’ information without perhaps suffering the immediate consequences. The tension of a narrative can be barrelling along like a tractor trailer and then suddenly the minor character can step out and push it into the traffic. Or pull it out of the way. They can be a playful irritant to the narrative trajectory. They are less developed so can be shadowy.
You make great use of these minor characters, and the shadows they cast are so clearly partly from them, partly fabrications of the “embattled psyche[s]” of your main characters.
There was likely a well of personal experience you were drawing from while writing Chandelier. You previously taught in Korea, which had to inform writing about Georgia and her time overseas. In your work as a bartender, you must have been regaled with horrific tales from a thousand Hugos (well done in pulling no punches with his physical and mental breakdown in Barcelona, by the way).
I’m wondering how you found the process of negotiating boundaries between the self and your characters. Was this something different for you than establishing a speaker in a poem? In some sense, maybe you were already doing some of these character sketches or vocal exercises in Masses on Radar. Gestural drawings towards the bigger canvas of the novel.
I really have no way of explaining where these characters came from. There is no direct line from my own experience and theirs. Yes, I have lived in South Korea, and spent time in Barcelona, and Gatineau, for that matter. I have drawn on some familiar situations but also made many up. I have felt many of the things Georgia, Hugo and Sarah feel, but disagree with them on other things. The book is a thousand lies tied together with its emotional truth.
Back to yours. I mentioned an enquiry into art. What I loved about your book is its integration of thought through many experiences and places—New York, Toronto, Fredericton, book store work, your extended discussion of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, Patrick Lane’s writing, etc. The whole is a coherent sum of its parts. In this, it attested to the noble goal of reflection as lifestyle. I’m wondering two things: did you have a particular thesis that you wanted to gather evidence toward, and I’m intrigued by the claims in your NOTES that several of what seem to be personal stories are “works of fiction.”
Looking back, I was starting to (wrongly) conflate my making of a poem with the shorthand of a temporary gig or stay, with abrupt upheavals or shifts I was experiencing both geographically and in my own consciousness. During a protracted feeling of rootlessness, I had the good fortune of taking a fascinating journalism course at NYU with writer Lawrence Weschler. He convinced me longform essays could be (and were often) as intricately constructed as poems. I was also slowly learning how to write prose through years of writing reviews of other peoples’ poetry collections, as well as trying to respond sensitively and productively to poets’ manuscripts in my work as an editor. I was also consciously looking to what other people like the Trouts or my friend Kalpna were doing in their working lives for similarities with the private act of composing poems.
When I arrived in Fredericton in 2016, I began working in a bookshop again and started to read a lot of fiction, especially autofiction. Then about 2021, after five or so years of reading and writing a lot of prose, I started to see ways that a few of the poems I was working on could thrive within an ecosystem that included both stories and essays. I saw that I could write something part memoir, part short story collection, part poetry collection, and this unclassifiable nature might keep it, on a macro level, in the realm of the poem (which satisfied my stubbornly non-linear brain). If the bookshop or workshop could house a variety of tools and still impart a particular aesthetic, character, or overall experience, so, perhaps, could my book.
To the last part of your question, as soon as I knowingly took some kind of creative liberty with a personal experience, that experience had entered the realm of fiction, and I would be correct to categorize it thusly. I’d read enough of either genre to understand where the lines for me were. But the structure of the book, winding an autobiographical essay around the stories and other essays, blurs those lines a second time in what I think is a compelling way. I have my editor Emma Skagen to thank for suggesting we walk the title essay through the book.
Back to Chandelier, there were many points in the novel where I sensed a poet enjoying the freedom to keep going, to keep describing, to keep encountering. A fellow flaneur in full stride. Were you as energized as I was by having the space for more episodic variety or descriptive sprawl than we might have in our poems?
Yes, I think so. Unless you’re writing an epic, a poem starts and ends in a pretty finite space. Every time you finish one, you’re faced with starting all over again. It’s a bumpy psychological roller coaster through the forty or fifty poems it requires to finish a book of verse. The longer forms have their challenges but at least you don’t have to create a new character every few pages. But the nuances of a book-length story have their own challenges. How can a character successfully develop while staying consistent? What happens, how and why? What should be said indirectly? What should be left out or delayed? The space is energizing, isn’t it?
Is it too early to ask what’s next for David O’Meara? Will you revisit the proto-essay about secondary characters and dispense some advice for the rest of us genre-curious poets out there?
I’d love to do a book of essays. I’ve got a list of things and many notes. I do aspire, as I characterised your last book, toward “reflection as lifestyle.” But whether those notes can be effectively articulated and collected is the dilemma. It’s always a question of what time is left after paying the bills.
What’s exciting is you have a new book of poems, Existing Music, coming out this spring. It’s been a few years since your last. Has your approach to poetry composition changed, and how? What can we expect with the new poems?
I look forward to these essays! The reality of bills aside, it seems that you’ve proven yourself more than capable of seeing a project through.
Existing Music, yes! It’s very close to being out there: April 15th of this year. Three parts: the first includes a lot of character studies and first-person poems dealing broadly with ideas of why people might make music (or write), might stop making music (or writing), and suggests that what happens between recordings – grave or mundane or exciting or entirely speculation – is also a kind of music. The second section is a kind of extended riff, borrowing heavily from an antiquated dictionary of musical terms and inspired by some of my amateurish mid-life hobbies, and tries to capture the kind of joy and unexpected tones and juxtapositions that happen when you just let go. The third section brings in a kind of band. These are poems situated among others at places like the bookshop, or they’re specific gestures to another person. A lot of the poems in this final section work with parts of translations I’ve been doing over the years from the Spanish poems of José Hierro. Nothing that appears in this section of Existing Music is a direct translation from Hierro, or even an approximation, but I try to work in the way a folk musician might build off a chord progression or a lyric in another song.
I could talk at a nauseating length about the way my approach to composition has changed in the ten years between this volume and my last. Basically, getting my hands dirty in other genres has helped to re-establish for myself the value of writing poems. I probably do a bit more background work outside of the poems to establish the tones and energies I want my poems to have. And yes, I reflect a lot, perhaps pre-maturely in my mid-forties, on how the poems of others haven’t just helped me to stay alive but have shaped the way that I live and the decisions I’ve made, be it in the minutiae of certain formal aspects or in their overall effects. I write my own poems from the things I have learned there.
David O’Meara is the award-winning author of five collections of poetry, most recently Masses On Radar (Coach House Books). His books have been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Award, the Trillium Book Award and the K.M. Hunter Award, and have won the Archibald Lampman Award four times. His poetry has been nominated for a National Magazine Award, quoted in a Tragically Hip song and used as libretto for a pastoral cantata for unaccompanied chorus, written by composer Scott Tresham. He is the director of the Plan 99 Reading Series and he was the founding Artistic Director for the VERSeFest Poetry Festival. He lives in Ottawa.
Nick Thran’s books include the mixed-genre collection If It Gets Quiet Later On, I Will Make a Display (2023) and three previous collections of poems. Earworm (2011) won the 2012 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been anthologized in Best Canadian Poetry and The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. Thran lives on unceded Wolastoqey territory (Fredericton, NB), where he works as an editor and bookseller.
