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Interview with Luci Shaw, August 11, 2010

 

Luci Shaw is a poet, essayist, and teacher. Writer in residence at Regent College in Vancouver, BC, her writing has been widely anthologized. Her most recent book, Harvesting Fog, with Pinyon Publishing, is her 30th book.

 

PINYON: Please tell us briefly about yourself.  

LUCI: I had a crazy, mixed up early life. My parents, former missionaries, were in England when I was born. Subsequently, they moved to Australia, and then to Canada as my father developed a ministry of conference speaking. This interrupted much of my education since we’d move in the middle of a term in one country and land in a completely different system. My dad was confident about my brother and me. “You kids are bright. You’ll catch up.” We did, but it was challenging! Most of my education was under British educational systems, a good thing, since I learned to write coherently, but my math suffered from moving around, and I never really learned the fundamentals.

 

PINYON: When did you start writing?

LUCI: I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write. I thought everyone did it. It wasn’t until I got into high school that I found it wasn’t a universal gift. I still have sample of the high melodrama of my childhood writing!

 

PINYON: Why do you write?

LUCI: I’ve always felt the need to condense experience into language. It gave me a special satisfaction to feel that I’d tied down an image, event or insight, that my imagination had captured something and jacketed it in words. My father, though no poet, loved poetry and carried it around in his briefcase. He was a great encourager, and showed my scribblings proudly to his friends. And I had really good teachers, especially in college in the U. S., who occasionally allowed me to write a poem instead of a research paper, and thereafter gave me an A + and the name of a literary journal to submit the work to.

 

PINYON: How do you write? Do you work with pen and paper? Or computer? Do you have a special room or place?

LUCI: I keep a reflective journal, and note things down as they happen—ideas as they come to mind, snatches of description, words that capture my attention or sound enticing. Words like celadon, or porcelain, that sound beautiful and fragile. Or fudge, or curdle, or blunt, that have a tactile quality. Notes on a lecture I hear. The sense of anxiety, or release from it. Answered prayers. Place names: In England, I drove through a town called Pen in Hand, and another called Ugley, and another called Croucher’s Bottom! Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, I love the American Indian tribal names—Nooksack and Squamish and Tillamook and Skagit with their fricative sounds. I use whatever writing instrument is handy. I like blank pages for the space to diagram or sketch without lines.

I’m beginning to start poems right on my computer screen, but the seed ideas are most often in my journal. Right now I’m in my wonderful study, lined with shelves of books, and I do much of my writing here on the computer. I have an ergonomic keyboard that helps my arthritic hands. The room overlooks a creek, and I love to write to the sound of running water. There’s a skylight, and a couch where I love to read under a window that overlooks our front garden, where we have all native plants, perennials, sandstone rocks, a Chinese water bowl, and no grass.

But I can write anywhere, thanks to the journal, which is small enough to fit in my purse. When I travel I take a laptop.

 

PINYON: Are there special people that have influenced your writing?

LUCI: Yes, countless friends are writers. I have a local group with whom I workshop, and a monthly gathering with Canadian writer friends just across the border from us in Bellingham. There are poet and writer friends all over the continent, and we send our early drafts to each other for feedback. And then, all my favorite authors! I have about ten books on my night table at any one time—fiction, devotional, biography, and magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, the Christian Century, the National Geographic, and Books & Culture, etc. Everything I read speaks to me in one way or another.

My son John, a doctor, is also an excellent poet. He is now in Thailand working with an NGO for three years to work with refugees from Myanmar. He just yesterday sent me a striking new poem about a lotus.

 

PINYON: You write poetry as well as personal essays, does any one genre appeal more to you?

LUCI: I have a longing to try fiction, but so far I’ve concentrated for many years on poetry and books of creative non-fiction. I love both genres, but I find it hard to switch back and forth easily. Right now I’m working on two different prose mss., and have only written four or five new poems since Harvesting Fog came out.

 

PINYON: Where do you get your ideas from?

LUCI: A hard but good question! My ideas come at me from anywhere and everywhere. Just about anything substantial that I read results in the urge to condense the ideas into images and poems. Human relationships are fruitful, as are Weather and Seasons, particularly Spring and Fall. I do find myself most at home in nature, in the created universe, and I live in a beautiful part of the world surrounded by oceans, islands, forests, mountains and lakes. Sometimes when I’m in a plane I get a new perspective, as the earth beneath me shows its larger patterns. Georgia O’Keeffe made charcoal sketches of the fractal patterns that show up in mountains and valleys and rivers. Whenever I travel I find new material in the endless variety of human and regional differences. Contrast is always important. I view life as a kind of chiaroscuro, with darkness highlighting light by its intrinsic difference.

 

PINYON: Which other aspects of writing are important to you?

LUCI: Though it’s a bit uncomfortable, I find a deadline keeps the pressure on me to complete an assignment. And when it’s done, there’s a corresponding sense of relief and exhilaration! But what I enjoy most is the flexibility of working at home and immediately getting to work when a poem is arriving. I know if I neglect it, or think “Of course I’ll never forget this urge,” it will evaporate or become blurry. So, spontaneity, and intimate friendship with my journal or computer are vital.

 

PINYON: You've said how important your study is for your work. But the poems in Harvesting Fog also seem universal, as if you're gathering pieces from the world as well as your own back yard?

LUCI: Yes, I value the sense of readiness, availability and familiarity my own study supplies, but the variation provided by travel or new experience often renews the impulse to write. I go through dry periods, when not much gets written, but I no longer anguish about them. So far, the urge towards poetry has always been refreshed, given time for reflection and insight.

 

PINYON: One fine poem in Harvesting Fog, "The Returns of Love," is subtitled "After George Herbert." Have the metaphysical poets (e.g., Herbert, John Donne, Thomas Traherne) influenced your writing?

LUCI: Yes, I’ve even sometimes been called a metaphysical myself! I love the idea that our minds are able to grasp things “beyond the physical,” to which our physical world often points. I am particularly moved and energized by G. M. Hopkins, and years ago I spent several weeks researching his life in England, Wales, and Ireland, especially the critical work about his poetry at Trinity College, Dublin. George Herbert has also influenced me with the depth of his spiritual fervor and insight.

 

PINYON: When writing, do you start with an idea, a form, an image, or something else?

LUCI: The process differs with each new piece. Sometimes a phrase or word from someone else’s writing will jump off the page for me and start a new train of thought. I think I’m almost internally and unconsciously describing what I see as I go through a day, and sometimes a phrase will resonate enough to make the beginning of a poem. Listening and “paying attention” to my circumstances and environment are pivotal for my writing. When writing an essay, almost anything I read, or hear spoken will provide food for thought that proves useful or adds dimension to the ongoing piece. I often hear a thoughtful and thought-provoking sermon in church, which gets me going. I guess you could call that serendipity, but to me it signals the connectedness of the universe of physical and metaphysical reality, and I practice receptiveness.

 

PINYON: Are you affected by other people's comments about your writing?

LUCI: I rely heavily on responses from fellow writers, three or four in particular. A working relationship with others who know me and are invested in my writing life are invaluable. It’s easy to get so close to one’s own writing that objectivity is blocked, though I’ve found that reading my own work aloud sometimes reveals flaws, in rhythm or logic or word order.

 

PINYON: Do you have any advice for other writers?

LUCI: My advice is to concentrate your reading on the best writing by others. Powerful language and perceptions are contagious. Work-shopping with other writers is helpful, as long as their opinions are intelligent and considered. And be open to questions without easy answers that can result in continuing self-education. As a writer of faith, I’m aware of God’s Spirit informing and illuminating me, bringing things to my attention,  and I believe we limited human beings need to make ourselves available to such influence and direction.

 

PINYON: What's your next project?

LUCI: I’m working on two new writing projects—extended treatments of different themes—prose, not poetry. I hope that these both end up as books, and I have a good body of work already done on each. And of course, catching new poems on the wing, and hoping, eventually, that they’ll end up in a book!