Lauren Carter : part one

Lauren Carter is the author of four books: the poetry collections Lichen Bright and Following Sea and the novels Swarm and This Has Nothing To Do With You (forthcoming September 7, 2019). Her long poem “Island Clearances” won first prize in the 2014 ROOM Poetry Competition, and she has twice been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Her prose has won the Prairie Fire fiction prize and been selected for Best Canadian Stories (ed. John Metcalf), longlisted for CBC Canada Reads, and nominated for the Journey Prize and the Giller Award. She blogs regularly about writing and life at www.laurencarter.ca

Photo credit: Jason Mills

How did you first engage with poetry?

My parents both trained as high school English teachers and were readers, so we had a lot of books in my house, including a fat, clothe-bound, blue hardcover book containing the big names of The European Canon. Wordsworth, Keats, Hardy, etcetera.

I would read these poems to myself, often out loud, and loved the truly romantic, moody lyricism and sense of them. The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees / The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas...

I started writing my own poems in imitation but then, one afternoon, I cracked open a book in my high school library to discover Susan Musgrave. I wish I could remember what poem of hers I read that day but the imagery floored me.

It made me realize that so much more was possible in terms of using poetry to build an evocative sense of emotion. It was almost like it gave me permission to tell the truth. The floodgates opened and my first poem was published in a now-defunct Saskatchewan literary journal located through the Writers' Market when I was 18.

Some of those early poems, written in my late teens and 20s, I still think of as my best work.