By Sophie Isbister (Opinion Editor) – Email
Elizabeth Bachinsky is the writer in residence at UFV. Having spent several years growing up in the Fraser Valley, she returns this Winter to spend a semester at our university advising students on their work and visiting classrooms. She is the published poet of three collections of poetry, Curio (2005), Home of Sudden Service (2006), and God of Missed Connections (2009). She has achieved critical acclaim, as well as several nominations for literary awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry in 2006. As a writing teacher, and the editor of Event Magazine, she brings formidable talent and a fresh, enthusiastic voice. Elizabeth sat down with The Cascade to talk about her work, her life, and her current role as writer in residence on campus.
How are you today?
I’m great; it’s a beautiful morning; it’s very foggy out here in Abbotsford today, but it’s a nice valley day.
So can you tell us a little bit about the purpose of a writer in residence? What do you offer to the UFV community?
Ok, well my job as Writer in Residence is to meet with students one on one and talk to them about their work in progress. So that could be anything from a handful of poems that you are working on for class, and you just want a set of eyes on them, or a whole manuscript that you happen to be working on. I can also consult on that. I can consult on all kinds of genres. My books are books of poetry, but I can also consult on personal journalism, creative nonfiction, fiction…I can talk about your screenplays too, so really, any genre. Bring it by and run it past me, and I’ll do what I can to help.
What do you do when you’re not at UFV? What is your day job?
My day job is I’m a creative writing instructor at Douglas College, so I teach … right now I’m teaching all poetry, and then I also run the literary magazine, Event Magazine, I have a history in publishing and I’ve been doing this for lots of years. My job job, my real job, is to write poems.
Speaking of writing poems and being from the Fraser Valley, a great amount of talent comes from the Fraser Valley, including yourself. You did spend a lot of your life living here. Can you talk about your experience growing up in the Valley and what is it about the Valley, if anything, that you think contributes to creativity or artistic expression?
Ohh, well, yeah there are a lot of really interesting creative people out here in the Fraser Valley. I think one of the things that makes people who live out here particularly resourceful, especially when I was growing up here in the 90’s, you know, this is sort of pre-internet time, there wasn’t really a record store, or you couldn’t really buy music out here, you had to, know you, make your radio antenna do weird things to pick up CITR, which was the university radio station at UBC, and you’d get to listen to all the new music that way. But yeah, you had to be resourceful in how you had access to media, I think. And also it made a lot of kids have to create their own media. So I like to think of the Fraser Valley as sort of the original DIY culture. You know, when I was a teenager growing up here, there were lots of like thrash bands and metal bands, you know, that was a really big part of the culture, and I loved going to all those all ages shows and making art and writing, which I always did.
Going into your academic career, did you know you wanted to be a poet/teacher/editor?
I’m gonna say yes. You know, I always knew what I was interested in, I always knew what I loved, I always knew the people that I loved, I loved writers, I loved poets. And about the teaching, you know, I actually thought, I did my undergraduate degree in English and creative writing at UBC and when I applied for the masters program I thought “oh gosh, there’s no way I’m gonna get in, it’s really competitive and probably won’t work out.” So I thought that I would do a PDP and study to be a high school teacher, because I love to work with students, right, I love to teach. So now it’s just amazing! I get to do both. I get to write, and teach, and yeah, be with the people I love, be with writers. So how much better could it be?
Well, it gets better! You get to travel a lot for your job [as a poet], and because of that, you get to see all over Canada. Do you feel that coming from the Fraser Valley, coming from a kind of small place like this, do you feel that sort of ads to your experience and sort of the way that you come across to people in the rest of Canada and out East?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. When I first started performing, I used to be really self conscious about the fact that I was from the Fraser Valley, and I used to have this whole schtick, you know, I’d get up on stage and be like, [affected Valley girl voice] “Soo, I’m like totally from the Fraser Valley, and you know, I’m a valley guurl,” and so I was kind of hiding behind that persona a little bit. And I think as I came to know myself a lot more and came to know my community a lot more, it really became a point of pride I think to realize that people in Toronto and Montreal and you know, places that are far away that I could never imagine, well, equally they could never imagine us. They could never imagine the landscape that we are from. Because it really is so utterly other. And you feel that divide of the Rocky Mountains as you go over them, like wow, we really are a frontier sort of place. So yeah I think it’s a big part of my identity. I’m always happy to talk about it with people.
Well, identity, where people come from, is very interesting stuff. I know that I was walking with a friend from his car to the school the other day and we both looked at Mount Baker and my friend remarked to me, “Oh, Baker looks really nice today,” and I thought about that and realized a lot of people in Canada don’t have that same experience of being able to look at Mount Baker every day and to see how nice it looks today.
Oh absolutely, it’s breathtaking, the landscape is just… you know, let’s be honest though, you know there’s a whole other side of the Fraser Valley that isn’t the breathtaking scenery and that’s also what makes it really interesting. You got this sort of ugliness that’s smashed up into this extremely beautiful landscape right, and I’m talking about the strip malls, and the freeways and the yeah the – not clapboard houses, but the vinyl sided houses that all kinda look the same– and the constant construction zones. So yeah then this real ugly side to the Valley that really gives it an edge, and yeah, it’s not actually an easy life out here, I don’t think. When we were growing up out here I found it really harsh you know, this place acting as a bedroom community so there’s a lot of un-parented kids running around all the time getting up to no good.
There was a lot of drug abuse among my friends when we were kids and a lot of drinking and you know so stuff happens! So, the stories that come out of this place can be a little edgy too, I think, which appeals to me cause it feels somehow authentic to me.
Going back to this idea of university, what do you see as the benefit of a university education in creative writing? A lot of people think, well, I can write, I’ll just stay at home and lock myself in a room until I finish a novel. What do you think are the benefits of working in a community and really studying a craft?
Well, I really like that you brought up the word community, because writers can be really isolating, especially when we are starting out. We think – well, we’re really protectionist: “I’m special, I must do this on my own, I must do it the hard way,” When in fact, community is so important. You know, making friends, sharing your work with those friends, making sure that you’ve got lots of eyes on your work, I mean that can only be a good thing. And I also want to say that I don’t think it’s necessary for a writer to go to university in order to become a writer. I think in order to write you have to read. You have to read, you have to write, and then you have to do it a million times, and then you slowly get better. But it can help! A creative writing program can give you the sort of direction that you might not realize that you need. And it can really expediate the process. So you could toil in obscurity for 15 years, or you could go to a writing program and speed that process up by you know, TEN YEARS! I don’t know, because you learn a lot when you’re suddenly – when you’ve got eyes on your work. You learn about people.
Your first book, Curio, did you write that while you were still in university?
No, I wrote my first two books at the same time, I wrote them in my early to mid 20’s, and I was a creative writing student at UBC. I was an undergraduate student and then a graduate student and, I wrote the two books yeah at the same time, but they’re just very different projects.
What draws you to poetry as a genre as opposed to another kind of writing? I know that you teach different styles of writing, but the books you’ve written and published are poetry books; what is it about the genre that attracts you?
Hmmm… well, yeah. I am drawn to poetry. It really just seems to be the way that my work arrives. It’s the genre that I’ve studied the most and read the most and that I’m the most comfortable with certainly, but I like poetry. I like to think of poetry as a delivery system. You know, it’s kind of like a cigarette that way. [laughs] It’s like the ideal delivery system for messages. Because they’re small, they’re condensed… well, they CAN be small, they can be condensed. That density of thought and feeling, there’s something about it that speaks to people immediately. I think that’s really powerful. And I also really love to perform so that appeals to me, the fact that I feel like there’s a performative aspect to the poetry.
You said that to be a great writer you have to be a good reader. I think that’s definitely true. What are some books or writers that inspired you when you were growing up?
Well I spent all my childhood years in Prince George, British Columbia, and we didn’t have a lot of books in the house when I was growing up, well, we had a number but some people, you go in their houses and it’s like wall to wall books and you’re like “wow!” But my mom always took us to the library, the Prince George library, and so I always read lots and lots of books. They’ve got little Super 8 video tapes of me in bed reading books to my mom, and you know, I’m a kid, and… ahh yeah, so reading was always a really big part of my life. And then as a teenager, you know, I used to go the library a lot, the Fraser Valley Regional Library, in Maple Ridge, that’s where I grew up, Maple Ridge. That’s how I found poetry. They had a big poetry section there and I remember taking out books by Lorna Crozier and bill bissett and especially bill bissett, if you’ve ever seen bill’s stuff it’s very phonetic.
bill came to the school recently to do a reading, last semester.
Awesome! Oh, he’s like magic, hey?
It was amazing.
Yeah, so, yeah I found bill’s work at the Fraser Valley Regional Library! And just was like, “What on earth is going on here!” And the same with Lorna Crozier, finding her poems, and you know, reading about her family, I thought, oh I didn’t realize you could write about your family. I didn’t realize you could just write about your life and that was literature. So yeah, I read a lot in high school. And then I had a mentor in high school, who turned me onto the works on Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, and we read a lot of you know, history books about Paris in the 20’s, that whole amazing sort of salon life that was going on there. That really intrigued me too so that got me really interested in some different types of writing.
You were also a student of Russian Literature when you studied here?
Yes absolutely, so I read a lot of Russian Literature. Actually I started reading Russian literature in my teenage years. I remember reading Anna Karenina in like Grade 11 or 12 or something. I went to Thomas Haney Secondary School in Maple Ridge, which is a self directed school, and so you didn’t really have classes, you attended these seminars. I know, it was really really progressive. And so, they just left me alone to read allday and write and draw in the art room. So yeah I remember sitting under a table at Thomas Haney Secondary School reading Anna Karenina, right when Levin has his sort of like philosophical epiphany, you know, and I was so moved! Hahaha, I remember being like [sob sob sob] under the table.
Anything else you would like to add, and words of wisdom and advice for students at UFV?
Keep writing. Keep writing, keep writing. Don’t stop! And come see me! I’m in room D3009, and I’m here on Thursdays between 10 and 5. And you can give me a call.
