The following blog post is an excerpt of a 2-hour conversation with poet and educator Sheryda Warrener around her creative practice as a part of The Alchemists blog series which focuses on emerging and established writer/creators who centre collaboration and interdisciplinarity in their artistic work and life.

ERIN:
I wanted to tell you…I read Floating is Everything and I loved it.
I wrote down some of the lines that I love.

LINES I LOVED

with light, counsellor declares me a knife maker.
Here’s the opening. I’ve been waiting for -I climb up.
Excerpt from Elemental

I’m as cold as the farthest planet. I’ve been standing here so long.
Excerpt from Confession

Now lift a corner and let fly the part of you that can’t help but destroy things.
Disrupt the tableau with a minor catastrophe.
Excerpt from A Sudden Gust

I love the use of persona in the work. I thought of the arm disappearing into space and was just like woahhh. There’s a connection around grief and floating in space. Something in the metaphor of outer space and a loss of gravity as being like grief. This shift in aperture.

I was researching about an AI bot that collaborates with humans on storytelling. There was this woman who had lost her sister to cancer and she couldn’t write about it. She couldn’t access it and then she fed her experiences into this AI bot. She fed the bot all of these conversations between her and her sister. The bot spat out something about grief being like floating in space. I thought it was very connected to your piece.

SHERYDA:
I didn’t realize there was grief in that poem until you mention it now. I lost my Dad a few years ago, we were estranged from one another at the time. So your reaction to the poem brings up a lot of emotion for me. I don’t think I was conscious that I was grieving this loss during the writing of that poem, even while he was still alive.

You asked me if Test Piece is connected to earlier work or earlier selves. Learning how to write the long poems in Floating is Everything gave me a foundation for the long poems in the new book. For a while, I was trying to force traditional narrative structures, but form comes to me via associative leaps between fragments of memory and observation. This is how my mind naturally makes sense of the world.

ERIN:
I completely understand that mode of sense-making. A lot of the inspiration to do this blog series connects to me feeling like an alien in the storytelling world. I feel like imposing a conventional story structure onto something can be damaging at times. I understand reverence and respect for more conventional story structures. I do think that is important, but there is also so much outside of that as well.

SHERYDA:
One of the questions you sent me ahead of time was: Why do you write? I thought about this one a lot, because it’s not something I tend to consider. I suppose the main thing I love about the process of making things is defamiliarization. It feels critical to the act of paying attention in the world, this investment in what I call “aliveness,” and it disrupts your self-making too, right? It’s like, oh, I can see myself anew because of this artwork, or this poem, or because of someone else’s experience of, and response to, something I’ve made. It’s this beautiful circular thing.

ERIN:
Yes! Even though writing can be a very solitary act, it ultimately makes me feel more alive and less alone…yeah. So, with that, I wanted to ask you: What feels magical or transformational for you with writing? What do you often find yourself in dialogue with?

SHERYDA:
I think in the last few years I've opened myself up to seeing myself in dialogue with pretty much everything. For a long time writing was really separate for me, there was a clear delineation. In the last few years I’ve learned that, you know, all of it is writing. I can go and hang out with my friends and have this wonderful conversation and I can see that as a part of my practice. I go into a classroom and have this experience with my students and that becomes part of my practice, as well. I can go to the pool twice a week, and swimming with its repetitive and ritualized gestures becomes part of the process, too. It’s exciting to think that one’s entire life might be the material for poems. To not put so much pressure on writing as this one particular and precious thing, right?

ERIN:
I love the idea of the ritualized repetitive movements and water. I love that.

I feel we have these strange stereotypes around what a writer is and what a story should be. I think it’s interesting to think that you could get a poem from voice notes.

SHERYDA:
From a screen.

ERIN:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SHERYDA:
A screenshot could be a poem. It’s this idea that the writing self is not separate.

ERIN:
Yeah, and it’s interesting to think of language, you know, how reverent we are with our words, or how trapped we can be in them sometimes. I think of how language is so linked to power dynamics. People are judged by how well they can put something into words.

So, I guess with that, I wanted to ask you how you negotiate your writing practice as an academic. I have experienced a lot of rhetoric in academia that I think can be a beautiful culture or language, in a way, but I also think it has the potential to be alienating. So yes, I wanted to ask you about this intersection in your life.

SHERYDA:

There’s this quote from Faux Pas by Amy Sillman that I wrote out and taped above my desk: “I remember finally realizing that my work as a teacher was part of my art work. It was very empowering and really startling to think of my whole life as the expanded field of painting.” Once I started to draw everything together into this “expanded field,” more became possible. I’ve been teaching online for the last couple of years using slides, and this led me to thinking of slides as a poetic form.

***

Arriving at the pool for an evening swim, Second Beach.

ERIN:
I appreciate that you have a leanness or what feels sometimes like an intentional scalpel in your work. Your work is architectural. It has a softness and an edge. It’s like there is an atrium in the building but also something modern and sculpted. There are natural materials but there’s also a knife in there. It’s not spilling over.

SHERYDA:
I would say there’s been an image-based approach where extraneous stuff gets removed and you're left with what I would call the “lyric moment.” This approach comes from how I was taught to revise in my undergrad: We would workshop poems and then we would just cut, the cuts would be the way to get at the heart of the thing. But I don’t think editing like that necessarily gets to the heart or essence of something. I find most of the time the poem requires a generative approach.

ERIN:
It’s interesting to think about gender and the knife or cuts, or being “cutting” you know? Maybe in a particular piece you’re being monstrous, or disgusting, or grotesquely sexual, or not conventionally “attractive.” Maybe the piece has nothing to do with obedience or being pretty, you know? These possibilities or textures haven’t been as available to women. That, and women aren’t allowed to fail, of course. It’s interesting, when I’m writing and rewriting draft after draft I feel like I am failing. It goes back to the settling though. If I know it’s not right, then it’s not right. I think collaborators are very important here though.

SHERYDA:
I started to see collage as a metaphor for process, not just the rearranging of the things you already have, but sometimes you're living your life and experience brings you this image, and it turns out to be what you’ve been waiting for all along. At times, it’s about rearranging the fragments, and other times, it’s about recognizing: Ah, I don’t have everything in front of me yet.

Even in the production stage, I’m discovering new things about the poems. I’m going to be writing these poems for a long time, until the questions become exhausted or transform into new questions with the old questions inside them.

Collage Materials waiting to be activated.

ERIN:
That seems to take some of the pressure off of creative writing as a cultural product, you know? The point is in the process continuing. I like that. That helps me.

SHERYDA:
That’s what I want the writers I work with to know.
That the process is the most valuable thing, not the product.

ERIN:
How would you make process clear when it comes to a print book?

SHERYDA:
When I saw My Last Door by Georgia O'Keeffe in person, I noticed that she had painted right onto the frame. If you get up really really close to an Agnes Martin grid, you can see the pencil marks along the edges. How can I leave a bit of the process of making on the page, to, in a way, catch myself in the act of making? For Test Piece, I photocopied earlier versions of poems onto photographs of the interior spaces where the poems occur. Including these visual-textual pieces feels like a response to that question.

Interior Space: the view from my kitchen window.

ERIN:
I love that! That’s something that’s been coming up a lot in these interviews. It’s this idea around how false or how uninteresting it is to be completely opaque about process. I’m bored by work that refuses to show the grid marks. So, clearly process is an obsession of yours in a great way. Do you have other recurring obsessions? Topics you go back to? Themes or questions you’re trying to explore or find?

SHERYDA:
It’s been through paying attention to visual artists that I’ve been able to recognize that we all have preoccupations, and that we attend to these over and over in our work. Process is definitely one of my creative obsessions, and I think portraiture, too. Materiality, immateriality. Form and formal innovations, hybrid forms, interdisciplinary forms.

ERIN:
It’s interesting to think of collage or overlapping as a process of collaboration. Aha, I’m pleased with my segue into the next question here. Are you ready? haha. I wanted to talk about collaboration with you. You’re in dialogue, as you said, with the world and with a lot of natural and visual materials. There’s also your work as an educator in the School of Creative Writing at UBC. I wanted to hear from you around moments of collaboration in your life and practice that offer something to you—some new opening.

SHERYDA:

An editorial relationship strikes me as deeply collaborative. Ian Williams was my editor for Test Piece. He’s such an astute reader and really understood what I was trying to do, and so during that process I was able to get more of myself on the page. Our editorial conversations became larger meditations about art and art-making. We would start with a question about the work, but then it became: How do other people try to resolve this question? This exchange is particularly special.

There is a great quote by Anne Waldman from an essay called “Going On My Nerve” that totally revised my thinking of the word:

“Collaboration is a calling to work with and for others, in the service of something that transcends individual artistic ego and, as such, has to do with love, survival, generosity, and a conversation in which the terms of language are multidimensional.”

It’s the spirit of this quote that I try to bring to any collaborative effort.

Students are my greatest collaborators. I don’t know if they recognize how much I’m learning from them all the time. Just the beauty of witnessing their learning experiences, observing how they hold space for vulnerability with such grace, seeing students challenge themselves...it’s not something I can put into words.

ERIN:
I absolutely think that conversation can be an act of collaboration. That excites me. I’m grateful to have this container for these kinds of conversations. It makes me feel hopeful. Making things keeps you alive, I think. With this I wanted to return back to the question of: Why do you write? A lot of what I am hearing from you is that you write in order to collaborate.

SHERYDA:
Yes!

ERIN:
I’ve been thinking about reading as an act of collaboration. There’s such intimacy in being in someone’s private headspace with the act of reading. It’s meditative. It’s a privilege, really. Your thinking, images, time, and process collaborate with the writer or reader, depending on the exchange. It’s exposing, but in a good way. I like that. I like the idea that collaboration could be possible with someone without necessarily needing to meet that person or speak with them. There’s something in...yeah, I think collaboration is inherently feminist. Yeah. It doesn’t feel political in the knife or tool sense, both of which are necessary, it’s not exactly cutting, but collaboration feels political to me.

So this leads me to my next question, which is: Do you see your practice as a means of activism in any way? Or, I guess, how do your values factor into your creation practice and work as an educator?

SHERYDA:
I care very much about poems. I love the process of art-making. I think it’s vital. So that feels like a strong value. With students, I’m like: “Do you want to make art? Ok, let’s talk about that. Let’s see what’s possible.” That feels radical to me.

ERIN:
There’s something in what you said around what’s possible. First of all, to try is so vulnerable. To encourage people in their effort, which is often their effort to understand themselves in relation to the world, is radical. I think art is about a vulnerable attempt to understand. So the prompt to try is bigger than what it might initially seem on paper, you know? Art-making feels like a life skill. A coping mechanism and a life skill.

SHERYDA:
My grad poetry class went on a field trip the other day with Holly Schmidt, who’s an artist in residence at the Belkin Gallery. We took a walk in the woods, and Holly said something along the lines of, “It may seem like a very simplistic idea, but attention is a form of care.” I wholeheartedly agree. If you wield this gift of attentiveness around and really look, you will also be able to turn this back on yourself and you’ll start to find care in that act.

A graphic score of forest sounds from Holly Schmidt’s sensory walk in spring 2022.

ERIN:
There is a question I’m asking everyone because I feel like it’s very important: When you're dealing with sensitive subject matter, your own or others’ traumas, or very personal material, what are ways you care for yourself and for others?

SHERYDA:
It’s a great question that I haven’t always been very cognizant of in my own process. Diana Khoi Nguyen was a guest in my undergraduate poetry class, and she suggests building care right into the writing process. So, if you’re writing through trauma, orient yourself in your body first. Ask yourself: how do you want to approach this?

I encourage students to take time to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not being hard on yourself for not making or producing. Opening yourself up to seeing making as this bigger thing. Homemade banana bread counts. It counts.

ERIN:
Thank you for that.

Of course, and you know, thinking about process, I also think about sharing and exchanging and how that is important. I am an extrovert when it comes to making. It’s not like something doesn’t exist or doesn’t have value if I don’t share it, but I do like to release it from my own head and skin if that makes sense. I need to track my relationship to creativity and productivity though. I need to keep finding ways of separating passion from pace or efficiency. Get off the treadmill.

SHERYDA:
Some people rely on writing for their income. I acknowledge the privilege of not having to produce poems to earn a living. I think that being easy on ourselves is important too, though. ERIN:Ouf, it’s so hard to do.

SHERYDA:
It is hard. We’re so hard on ourselves.

ERIN:
I think about that sometimes. I would never exploit someone else’s resources or time or selfhood but then I do it to myself.

SHERYDA:
Yes, or in a situation where I really screw up or I really fail, I put so much pressure on myself. It’s like pure emotion that I feel, and I torture myself. You would never hold someone else to that kind of accountability, right?

ERIN:
That’s exactly it. Also, speaking of accountability, I’m wanting to watch our time here, and we’re definitely coming up to it, but I do have one last question for you: How do you feel interdisciplinarity or hybridity factor into your work as a writer?

SHERYDA:
Yeah, there’s something about where the edges touch that is really interesting to me. I think that's where there’s a lot of potential and possibility. It’s around what happens at the intersection of image and text. I apply a lot of art-based modes and approaches to my own art-making. I take whatever a visual artist tries out in their studio, and I try to do it with language as my medium. So that’s like a literal way that interdisciplinary factors in.

A truly innovative interdisciplinary thinker is Mónica de la Torre. Her book Repetition Nineteen is process-based. The last poem in the book is a transcript from an art residency she did in New York. She was offered this tiny green space one might call a “parklet” in the middle of the city and she would invite passersby to read poems out loud. She created this pop-up art residency, and then she had all these conversations with people, which was a really beautiful community-based approach, and then she did this third thing where she turned it all into a poem. That’s precisely what I’m talking about. Process, community, collaboration, conversation, and the record for this event become the poem.

The process being as complex as the human being making the work.

Preparing collage materials for a mail-out.

A WRITING PROMPT!

A Correspondence

Gather a mix of textual and visual materials from around your house: receipts, scraps of paper, bits of fabric or thread, images ripped or cut from magazines, to-do lists, recycled packaging, doodles, lists, bits of tissue or wrapping paper. It’s best if you complete this step without being too precious about it: just do a quick scan of your living space and grab anything that is interesting.
Send these materials to a friend in an envelope along with a postcard-size piece of cardstock, a stamp, your return address, and a note inviting your friend to make a collage, using the rectangle of cardstock as backing. Encourage them to use only what appeals to them, and to integrate their own domestic visual-textual materials. Give them one week to complete the collage and mail it to you using the stamp and address enclosed.
While your friend is making the collage, collect everyday fragments (observations and associative impressions) in a notebook.
As soon as you receive your collage, display it somewhere in your living space where you’re bound to have a daily encounter with it: fridge, mirror, above your desk. Live with this collage your friend has made, look at it every day for one week, and make note of the textures, colours, images, and surprising juxtapositions, as well as the associations your mind makes.
Weaving together your response to the collage with your own separate observations and associations, create a poem. Give it a title. Send your poem in the mail to your friend with a note of thanks.

ABOUT THE CREATOR

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