Paul Pearson : part one

Paul Pearson is the co-founding editor and chapbook designer for the Olive Reading Series. His poems have appeared in Descant and Event, and the anthology Writing the Land: Alberta Through Its Poets from House of Blue Skies. Raised in a mining town in the mountainous back-country of southeastern British Columbia, Paul has since relocated to Edmonton where he lives and writes with his wife and two children. Lunatic Engine is his debut collection.

Photo Credit: Oscar Pearson

How did you first engage with poetry?

I've always known that I wanted to be a writer though I always thought though that I'd end up in science fiction, my first love as a reader. I always liked poetry and did well in it in school but I always considered it something you studied, rather than something you read for fun or, God forbid, wrote. Then, in my first-year University English lit class, I stumbled into Patrick Lane, was struck dumb with "Mountain Oysters." Here was a poet who grew up in the bush in the interior of BC, like I did. Here were poems about people I knew: working people, mountain people, alcoholics and men like my father. I had no idea poetry could actually mean something real, something personal, something now. That was it. From that moment I was a poet.