an interview with Julia Williams

CV2: First of all, congratulations on the publication of your first collection of poetry, The Sink House. How does it feel to be at this point in your writing career? What has been the highlight of this experience so far? Have there been any disappointments?

Julia Williams: Thanks! Most creative work (especially when you’re just getting started) is done voluntarily, so having the opportunity to write at a more professional level is a real privilege. There haven’t been any disappointments—a little fretting perhaps, but no disappointments.

CV2: Was Coach House the first stop for your manuscript, or had you been looking for a publisher for a while?

JW: There are a number of excellent publishing houses in Canada, but Coach House has a mythic quality that I’ve always found intriguing. I couldn’t resist sending The Sink House there, but I was certain it would be rejected. I sent the manuscript to a couple of other publishing houses where I thought I had a pretty good shot ... and, of course, they turned it down. A year passed, and I’d long since given up on The Sink House when Alana Wilcox e-mailed me. She said she’d found my manuscript at the bottom of a pile of papers, and that Coach House was interested in publishing it. Needless to say, I was a little surprised and a lot ecstatic.

CV2: What expectations did you have going into the publication of your first book? Did those expectations measure up to the reality of the experience?

JW: I just wanted to learn more about the publishing process and meet some interesting people, which I have.

CV2: Editing a manuscript can sometimes be the most “unforgiving” part of the publication process. What was the editing process for The Sink House like, and how much did the original manuscript change in this process?

JW: From the beginning, The Sink House has been about a flood and a love affair, so that much is consistent. While it hasn’t become totally unrecognizable, comparing the original poems to the finished book is a bit like comparing a feather to a bird. The manuscript began life as a small collection of poems I wrote for a poetry course I was taking. When the course finished, I expanded it into a chapbook, and, over the next year or so, beefed it up to manuscript size. I’d altered it further by the time Coach House accepted it, and over the past few months it’s undergone plenty of tweaking and polishing.

Having a piece of work edited attentively and carefully is a huge treat. No two people read a text the same way, and having the opportunity to get feedback from a canny, engaged editor (or two) is enormously helpful. It’s always valuable to hear responses to your work, whether it ends up affecting the finished piece or not.

The rewriting process is the part I find most absorbing and educational. I like changing my work, and when I edit a piece, I normally discard the previous version because I always think, rightly or wrongly, that the change is an improvement. In that sense, each new version can be considered an apology for the previous one.

CV2: What did you gain as a poet from this editing process that you didn’t have before? Has publishing your first book given you more confidence in yourself as a writer?

JW: I have a much better sense now of how a full-length poetry manuscript works, which is already helping me to write more cohesively, with an eye to structure and balance. I’m working on another manuscript and I’m finding everything easier the second time around.

Having this book published has certainly given me more confidence—not so much about my writing as my justification for pursuing it.

CV2: What is the most important thing poetry does? What does poetry do for you? Why do you write it?

JW: The simplest description of poetry is that it’s an effort to create an elemental experience out of a fairly restrictive symbol system. This, I think, is the root of its fascination and frustration. The rare moments when it works, it works brilliantly; when it doesn’t, it’s more or less useless.

I write poetry because I like to—I like the way it opens windows in language. I like finding new ways to say old things. It’s part of the way I think and the way I understand my surroundings.

Like many people, I started writing poetry as a teenager. It all stank (as teen angst poetry often does) because I was more concerned with seeming deeply perceptive than with expressing ideas effectively. Later, I studied prose writing for a few years, and then I got back into poetry again—primarily as an exercise in form. To avoid my former mistakes I wrote very academic, impenetrable stuff that, if anything, stank more than my teen efforts. As I gained confidence I managed to merge the two approaches and develop a style I actually liked. I’m still developing this style. Years from now, I’ll probably think it stinks too.

It’s miserable to be a bad fiction writer or a bad journalist, but there’s something truly unforgivable and clownish about being a bad poet. I’ve always been extremely critical of my own work, but these days I’m relaxing a bit. Poets aren’t born, after all—writing is a skill that must be cultivated and developed. My work doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be moving somewhere.