an interview with Fiona Tinwei Lam

CV2: Your first book, Intimate Distances, was published by Nightwood Editions in 2002. How does it feel to have this poet’s milestone behind you?

Fiona Tinwei Lam: When the book came out, I was excited, but it also felt like a natural and expected progression from publishing in literary magazines and anthologies. I gave birth to my son and graduated that same year, so it was an eventful time. Having a book published has led to many more invitations to give readings not only in Vancouver, but other cities. Having a concrete manifestation of my work, I now feel somewhat more legitimate and credible when I describe what I do to other people—but only slightly more, given the general public’s attitude toward poets and poetry! Interestingly, acceptance for publication made me want to write even more deeply, to write something new—start another manuscript of poems.

CV2: The title Intimate Distances suggests contradiction, and certainly the poems in this collection address many issues related to the expectations of a North American family—how one is suppose to look according to media versus who our families are in reality. The added layer in your collection is that your parents are Chinese and bring all the cultural expectations of their heritage into a country that neither necessarily appreciates nor understands their or your life experiences. This is something you come back to again and again in your book; how does this experience of otherness continue to shape your poetic space?

FTL: The oxymoronic aspect of the title conveys how there can exist vast emotional divides in supposedly close, familial, or domestic settings. Alienation and isolation can occur within the most intimate realms and relations. The title also refers to how it may take a certain kind of distance or distancing, temporal or emotional, to adequately convey personal or private experience.

As for “otherness,” I have always been an outsider, but the reason can’t be reduced to culture, broadly defined. It is much more complicated than being an immigrant to Canada who was born in Scotland of parents who came from Hong Kong. There are so many particularities and complexities of parentage, history, personality, social class and changes therein, religion, neighbourhood, friendships, education, etc. that play a part—let alone the interplay between all those elements. (The kind of narrative coming from a Chinese-Canadian whose first and only language is English, whose parents were both doctors partly educated in the west and who could both speak English fluently and whose religious background was Christian, etc. would be completely different from someone whose first language is not English, whose parents were not professionals or Christians or English speakers.) Losing a father to cancer at a young age, being raised by a troubled and angry mother, being a loner and an outcast in school—those are some other major elements that have forged the “otherness.” Of course, being an outsider has not only given me a different vantage point from which to see the world, it has also given me the desire to write.

CV2: The title and theme of this issue were directly inspired by The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, by French philosopher and poet Gaston Bachelard. In a broad sense his book discusses the inspiration process that generates poetic imagery; more specifically, The Poetics of Space is about the archetypal influence of home, both literally and formatively, on human imagination. Bachelard’s poetic premise is that our collective recollection of home as our most intimate, protective, enclave allows the space for creative inspiration, stating in his introduction—”If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” As dreaming is defined by Bachelard as source poetic imagery, what is your sense of the place your poetry emerges from—is it an internal or external place? How is it linked to your sense of the security of house and home? Please talk about this relationship to your creative process and how it shaped the poetry in Intimate Distances.

FTL: I wonder if Bachelard had one of those nurturing, warm, fuzzy childhoods I always hear about, which he has somehow generalized to everyone! My recollection of home is as a site of conflict, rejection, insecurity, tension, grief, and—after my father’s death—barely controlled violence. I have to laugh at the notion of my familial home allowing space for “creative inspiration” or sheltering daydreaming in peace. I had little privacy or protected space growing up—my mother used to root through my garbage, closets, and drawers, looking for evidence of wrongdoing. The one time she found me daydreaming in my room, she accused me of being on drugs. There was a hole in my flimsy plywood bedroom door for over fifteen years from where she’d thrown a bedside table when I’d tried to close the door on her. There was no one else’s home to run to—friends or family. Any “collective recollection” of a secure, protective home has certainly evaded me.

I first found inspiration to write poetry through reading poetry in one of my mother’s magazines—not through anything related to my home or house. I was twelve years old. Later, I wrote poems in hallways at high school during lunch break. Dreaming—of the day or nighttime variety—wherever it occurs, is, of course, one source of poetic imagery. It serves to recharge the subconscious and conscious so that images and ideas can form and emerge. Mainly my poetry comes from witnessing others around me, from my individual experience, and from memory and emotions stored in my body. Of course, the body—and a woman’s body in particular—is not truly secure. But I was very fortunate not to have been subjected to physical abuse, merely the emotional kind. Those experiences of conflict, tension, grief, etc. that I was steeped in as a child have inspired many of the poems in Intimate Distances. For example, my poem “Camouflage” (which appeared on local transit a few years ago), about a girl hiding in her closet, attempting to escape an angry parent, illustrates how home was a place of anxiety and dread, hardly a place of refuge.

As for creative process, to really start writing seriously, I needed to leave my mother’s house. I had to leave law school and lawyering. I had to leave my marriage. They were all imprisoning, suffocating forms of shelter for me. I had to be on my own—which, of course, meant facing other kinds of uncomfortable and difficult relationships and experiences.