Tanis MacDonald : part one

Tanis MacDonald is the author of several books of poetry and essays, including Out of Line: Daring to Be an Artist Outside the Big City. She is the co-editor of GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times (2018) and the editor of Speaking of Power: The Poetry of Di Brandt (2006). Her book, The Daughter’s Way, was a finalist for the Gabrielle Roy Prize in Canadian Literary Criticism. Her latest book is Mobile (Book*hug, 2019). She is the winner of the Bliss Carman Prize (2003) and the Mayor’s Poetry City Prize for Waterloo (2012). She has taught at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and in 2017 won the Robert Kroetsch Teaching Award from the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs. Originally from Winnipeg, she teaches Canadian Literature and Creative Writing at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

Photo credit: John Roscoe.

How does your work first enter the world? Do you have a social group or writers group that you work ideas and poems with?

I wouldn’t have figured out a writing practice if it hadn’t been for my first writers’ group in Toronto in the 1990s. I was part of that group for about five years, and we met in person every two or three weeks to read each other’s work; that group was really important to me. I know that this won’t always be possible at all times and places, but I wish for all writers an experience – even just a brief one – in which they can be part of a group of supportive peers who are generous and smart and take care of each other. There’s nothing else like it. And for a long time when I was an emerging writer, I wouldn’t send anything out to a journal that hadn’t been workshopped with these poet friends. But then life invaded: I moved and moved again, to three different cities in a decade, and all those moves pretty much upset the system of small-group writer support I had refined up until then. Online connection is good, but I’m still pretty envious of folks who have writer friends who they can see all the time. I like using Skype (or even an actual telephone call – so old-school!) to stay in touch with writer friends who live far from me.