Sarah de Leeuw : coda

How important is music to your poetry?

Music in important to my (writing of) poetry only in so far as I cannot listen to music and write poetry at the same time. I always write in complete silence. Sometimes, when I’m driving and listening to the radio, for instance, or out for a run listening to a playlist, a song lyric or line will resonate with me. I’ll toss and tumble it around in my head while running or driving, reconfiguring it into a line of my own. But I’ll write it and work with it only in the silence of no music.

Sarah de Leeuw : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

In the last two months I’ve been utterly transfixed by Kaie Kellough’s Magnetic Equator. I’m also reading The Grand River Watershed: A Folk Ecology by Karen Houle and TREATY # by Armand Garnet Ruffo.

Sarah de Leeuw : part four

How do you know when a poem is finished?

I don’t.

Sarah de Leeuw : part three

Why is poetry important? 

Poetry refuses givens, eschews the expected, and allows for different worlds and ways of being to be imagined. Poetry offers the chance for radical reconfigurations of understanding ourselves and our relations to everything beyond and outside ourselves. Poetry is language being (re)born. Poetry inspires change.

Sarah de Leeuw : part two

How did you first engage with poetry?

When I was very young, maybe between the ages of 3 and 5, my father read me Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner over and over again as my primary bedtime story. I fell asleep to the sounds of words becoming storms and travels. Later in life I often wandered into the poetry section of libraries in the small northern towns I grew up in. I just choose random books from the shelf, never really understanding what I was reading, yet enjoying it for reasons beyond myself.

Sarah de Leeuw : part one

Dr. Sarah de Leeuw, a Professor with the University of Northern British Columbia’s Northern Medical Program, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of British Columbia, is a cultural-historical geographer and creative writer (poetry and literary non-fiction). She grew up on Haida Gwaii and Terrace, both in northern British Columbia. Her research, creative writing, teaching and activism focus on feminist anti-colonial social justice, especially in rural, remote, and marginalized geographies. Author or editor of 11 books and more than 100 journal papers and book chapters, de Leeuw has been short-listed for a Governor General’s Literary Award, has won a Western Magazine Gold Award and the Dorothy Livesay BC Book Prize, and holds a Canada Research Chair in Humanities and Health Inequities.  She oversees The Health Arts Research Centre at UNBC and is a Research Associate with the National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health (NCCIH). In 2017, de Leeuw was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada as a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists.

What are you working on?

A long poem, written entirely in couplets, entitled Lot. Infused with historical documents and settler anthropological stories, it’s about growing up on Haida Gwaii and the colonial geographies of British Columbia today.