Frances Boyle’s Light-carved Passages was released by Doubleback Books earlier this month. Frances spoke with Doubleback Books editorial intern Katy Nguyen about family, reflection, art, and home. Light-carved Passages is available for free download at the Doubleback Books website. 

Katy Nguyen: What was your thought process in putting together Light-carved Passages? Was there an overarching narrative or theme that you hoped to achieve?

Frances Boyle: Like many debut collections, Light-carved Passages began with me assembling many disparate poems I had written over a number of years, ranging from my first-ever published poem (not counting the high school and university newspaper publications which are rightly confined to history) to more recent ones. The work in putting the collection together, what poet Sue Goyette once called “writing the big poem”, was to find the themes, preoccupations and tics that resonated with each other, and to shape them into sections. In the end, the poems coalesced around a number of themes: family of origin, interiority and reflection, often in nature, created family, and responses to artwork in various media. These themes turned into five sections (which became six in the current version), though they aren’t hermetically sealed off from one another. The themes overlap and show through in shadows and echoes, in conversation with each other. When I realized that the image of car headlights carving a passage through the dark appeared in several poems, I knew I had my title.

KN: By the end of your poems, there is a tension that rests just underneath the surface of them. How do you navigate tension and decide when to end a poem?

FB: I’m never entirely sure when a poem ends. There have been times when I’ve pushed on past when it really ought to have ended, writing lines that felt like an overly-neat wrap-up or an explanation of what the poem already said. In that case, the work was to trim back the poem as I revised. Other times, I felt a poem had come to an end, but in revision pushed myself to go deeper into the emotion or the language to what felt like a more satisfying and richer result. Finding the balance, maintaining that tension you asked about, is for me a question of feel, of nuance and some delicacy.

KN: Where did you draw inspiration from for this collection? Who or what did you look to as you put Light-carved Passages together? 

FB: As is evident from the acknowledgements, I turned to many sources of inspiration for the individual poems, including international writers like Seamus Heaney and Sylvia Plath and iconic Canadian poets such as Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Don McKay and Judith Fitzgerald. But in addition to writing directly sparked by other published work, I always draw inspiration from fellow writers in my community, many of whom I thank (and continue to thank) in the book. One of my writing groups, the Ruby Tuesday group, has been together for 18 years, and I credit them with major influence on the poems, both in initiation and in revision. I’ve also been lucky to work with several great mentors; Barry Dempster in particular worked with me extensively as I put this collection together and was endlessly kind and supportive, while frequently asking me to “put some pressure” on a phrase or a line.

KN: In the poem “And the room breathed”, you wrote, “I refuse to mourn days past.” Can you speak about this great sense of lost connections, memory, and longing? 

FB: Well, the poem may say it better than I’m able to in prose! What I think I was attempting to convey is the wish and hope that connections—with people, with places—are never really lost, that they can be accessed, either with the effort of refusal to believe in permanent loss, or perhaps with the effortlessness of letting go. Longing is an essential component in my visceral sense of how memory recreates connections and braids them into strands that sustain emotion in the present day. Another poem speaks of how “the moment never lasts”, but the crystallized feel of it lives on in the heart and, hopefully, in the poems.

KN: Even further, “Sort of an Elegy” is the shortest section in the collection. Was this an intentional decision? 

FB: This section is actually one of the very few parts of the collection that changed materially for the Doubleback republication. In the original book, the first three poems in the section appeared as a multi-part poem, even though two of them had earlier been published separately (“Passchendaele” was my first publication, and “Wake” was first place winner in the “Great Canadian Literary Hunt” magazine contest). Because all three dealt with the same subject matter, the days surrounding the sudden death of my younger brother, I decided to present them as a single poem, which felt right at the time.  When I had the opportunity to make edits for this new edition, I chose to separate them again, so as to give breathing room to each of the poems, with their individual moods and slightly different time frames. “Sepia” felt like an apt coda to those memories and my sense of how we preserve them, so I carved the four poems out as a separate short section that felt complete in itself.

KN: Several poems touch upon motherhood and daughterhood. How did the two inform this collection?

FB: Mother-daughter relationships, and their inherent challenges and sometimes joys, are key to both this collection and my two other poetry books. They are also thematically important in much of my fiction, particularly my novella, Tower, and my forthcoming novel, Skin Hunger. In Light-carved Passages, my role and emotions as a mother are central to the “Bouquet” section (and to a couple of poems in the final section), maybe because my own daughters were still in the more challenging than joyful stages during the time when many of these poems were written. Several poems in the “Blueprint” section situate the speaker as a daughter within a family, and that optic is relevant to the reflections in other poems. Much but not all of the mothering and daughtering material is based on real life; there are also imagined mothers and daughters here, including Persephone and Demeter in the poem “Winter”.

KN: In another poem, “The Land is Laid Out Forever”, there appears to be themes of home, affirmation, and reassurance. The line—“Don’t ever forget where you come from”—comes to mind. What was on your mind when writing this one?

FB: This poem was originally written in a long-ago workshop, so I can’t recall the assignment or prompt that spurred it. What I feel it was trying to do was evoke the various forces at work upon leaving home; specifically, the Saskatchewan prairie city where I grew up. The man in the poem, my boyfriend at the time, who I’ve long lost touch with, gave me the gift of that somewhat ceremonial farewell evening, and the imperative to “Don’t ever forget”. I attempted to do justice to that command (which I also positioned as a request on his part) by being highly attentive to the specific details of that moment, and that landscape, focusing on images as closely as I could recall or evoke them to create a sense both of place and of intense emotion.

KN: All of the imagery in Light-carved Passages is rich and specific. When writing these poems, do you have these scenes and moments crisp in your mind? Or are they something you build upon as you recall them?

FB: I think it’s a little of both. In drafting, I’ll often riff off an image that comes from another poem, or let sound and rhythm carry me through wordplay into something more specific. The poem “Silvered” is an example of that—playing with assonance and rhyme led me to the more concrete images later in the poem. Deepening the imagery and increasing the specificity most often comes out in revision, when I carve away extraneous words and ideas to focus on what feels strongest, most evocative, enhancing metaphor and figurative language, and working to crystallize the images so they carry more freight.

KN: In the “Blueprint” section of the collection, how did you go about writing these poems? It felt as though you were weaving this segment with a lot of sentiment in mind. Would you say it almost sets the tone for what the rest of the collection will be like?

FB: Exactly: the section can be viewed as the template, the blueprint, that sets the tone for the entire book, just as experiences within one’s family of origin are very often the blueprint for how a person will respond or behave later in life and in other relationships. In the section, I wanted to include both poems based on real experiences with my family of origin, as well as others that arose from imagination, all of which I hope establish a certain emotional tenor that reverberates through the whole collection.

KN: Did Light-carved Passages go through a lot of changes from other perspectives and voices? (For example, editing, sharing the poems, reading aloud, etc.) If yes, how so? 

FB: Yes, there were many many changes, both to individual poems throughout the time I was working on the collection, and on the collection and its ordering. After working on a poem through a few drafts, my next stop was almost always to share with my writing groups for feedback. I didn’t always accept their suggestions, but I found that I learned as much from comments that I disagreed with as from those that felt right and true; recognizing why I disagreed helped me clarify my intent for a poem and work to realize it. Reading aloud, either at the group or at open mics, had a way of making me hear the poem anew, recognizing awkwardnesses and places that needed to be clearer. Later, I was fortunate to work with a fabulous mentor, Barry Dempster, through the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity who challenged me to do deeper dives into the imagery and the language, and guided me as I shaped the collection to clarify the thematic flow and conversations among poems and between sections of the book. And my editors, Rita Donovan at BuschekBooks, and Bethany Mulholland and Danielle Hanson at Doubleback, all had valuable input on the ultimate shape of the book.

KN: Are there any rituals and routines that you do before writing a poem? Or does the writing come to you naturally?

FB: I wish it came naturally! I tend to be very logical and linear in normal life, so my writing routine helps me sidestep that analytical part of myself. Letting go of logic and following intuition, sound or rhythm can lead into surprising places whether in memory or in imagination. Much of my poetry comes from freewriting in response to a prompt, be it an exercise or simply reading and reflecting on another poet’s work. This most often happens in the weekly sessions with my Ruby Tuesday writing group. Our routine is to first consider a prompt that one of the members has brought, reading the poems aloud. We then allow three minutes of silent centering, to reflect on what we’ve heard or to settle into whatever else emerges. Finally, we free-write for a set time—usually 12 or 15 minutes—then each of us has the option of reading the result aloud, to minimal comments. This all happens before we turn to workshopping the poems that members have brought for our input.

KN: And lastly, for budding poets and other creatives, what do you believe is the best way to go about starting or continuing a project?

FB: I am speaking just for myself here, since I know many writers who do begin writing with a specific project that they want to pursue (or that they feel compelled to pursue). I, however, have never consciously set out to write a collection or chapbook. I’ve always begun by writing individual poems, so that’s what I’m most comfortable suggesting. Write the poems that come to you, write lots of poems and share them with people whose opinions you value. Those opinions shouldn’t be considered the definitive word on a poem but, as you learn to trust your instincts, they will help you to find your own voice. You may get some further sense of what’s strong in as you submit to lit mags (rejections are inevitable, personalized comments are rare, so treat them like gold!). Once you have what feels like a critical mass of work, it will be time to take a close look at the stack of poems and see what themes or motifs recur, images that you revisit consciously or unconsciously. Your poetic obsessions are the best clue to how you can proceed to shape the larger work, finding and reinforcing threads through the larger work, either discarding poems that don’t fit or finding a way to bring them into the conversation, and sometimes writing new poems where you see a gap. It’s an iterative process, so requires patience and some stamina!

Read Light-carved Passages at the Doubleback Books website!

Frances Boyle is the author, most recently, of Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). In addition to two other poetry books and several chapbooks, her publications include Tower (Fish Gotta Swim Editions, 2018), a novella, Seeking Shade (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2020), an award-winning short story collection and Skin Hunger, a forthcoming novel. Boyle got to know Pearl when they were both members of the Ruby Tuesday writing group and has admired her and her writing ever since.

Katy Nguyen is a budding creative studying Sociology and English at the University of California, Irvine. Katy enjoys reading and writing about the little things, music, and peoplehood. In her spare time, she likes to peruse around stationery shops and add more pens to her growing collection.