an interview with Nina Berkhout

This interview was conducted electronically in December, 2003.

CV2: Your first book of poetry, Letters from Deadman’s Cay, is absolutely stunning, both gentle and remarkably tough at the same time—a wonderfully lyrical collection in which each poem flows gracefully from the one before it. It has a unique narrative thread—how did this book come together? Did you plan to create a book at the beginning of the writing process or did it come together afterward? And in the end, how truthful would you say is the published collection to the creative vision you began with?

Nina Berkhout: Letters from Deadman’s Cay materialized from a bundle of letters my mom handed me when I returned to Canada from Long Island in The Bahamas. I was experiencing reverse culture shock, and wasn’t adjusting very well in Toronto after spending half a year on an extremely remote island. Within a few days, I flew home to Calgary. After watching me mope around for a week, my mom finally handed over all the letters I’d written to my family and said, “Here. Write the story you’ve just lived. Call it Letters from Deadman’s Cay.” So I returned to Toronto and spent my next several months of free time writing. I suppose it was a form of therapy more than anything else, permitting me to revisit the people and landscape I’d grown attached to, especially since I felt like it had all vanished as soon as I left the island. Even landing in Nassau, I was already asking myself, “Did that place really exist?” I know that in some instances, it’s wise to wait several years before writing something you’ve lived, to give yourself time to absorb the genuine significance. But in this case, had I waited even a year, I don’t think the experience would have come out on paper in the same way.

On the island, my concept of time was flipped upside down. I didn’t have access to a computer or the Internet or email, and phone lines were often down. The only way I could communicate with the outside world (this is ironic since I was only a few hundred miles south of the USA) was to write letters, some of which I’m sure never reached Canada. Although I had all the time in the world to write while I was on the island, the only thing I was capable of was rambling journal entries and letters to my family. I remember nights, staring out the window into the dark for hours, trying desperately to compose poems, and then throwing them away. The book took on a narrative form since the Bahamian patois has a certain ocean-like melody to it, running along without line breaks or interruptions. This is what I tried to capture in the passages I wrote. I was extremely fortunate because the published collection remained true to this—other than minor technical edits, NeWest Press printed the collection exactly as I’d sent it to them.

CV2: Your professional background is in museum studies, which is, how you got to Dead Man’s Cay, and your creative background is poetry. Would you talk a bit about the relationship of those two aspects of your life? How does your work in museums contribute to your poetry? What does your poet side contribute to your museum work?

NB: Yes, I was given the opportunity to go to Long Island, the Bahamas, in order to set up a community museum. (Deadman’s Cay was actually the settlement I lived in, consisting of a few houses along the road that stretched the length of this island.) I have worked in museums for close to eight years now, and most of my poetry has been museum-inspired. In my field, each artefact and object I encounter has a story and I’m always surrounded by history. The result is that there are many ghosts! Often it’s inspiring, yet on occasion it can be oppressive. I work in isolation on most projects—I spend a lot of time alone in storage rooms and vaults, examining objects. I daydream too much when I should be cataloguing and documenting. My last job consisted of setting up a museum about a writer inside her restored, childhood home. I spent eight months trying to understand this writer, not only her works but, more importantly, her life and the person she was—I had to figure out how best to present her to the public. During this time, I found myself unable to write at all. It came to the point where I dreaded entering that house each day, knowing that my mind would conjure up the sound of a typewriter, feet coming up the staircase, etc. In short, the experience didn’t turn out the way I thought it would, and here is that example where I’ll need many years to figure out what it was all about, before I put it to paper. Somebody once told me that I write too much about objects and not enough about humans … maybe this is the result of my profession. But I do think that poetry can contribute to museum exhibits in the sense that it breathes life into the subject through more humane narratives, bringing a less academic interpretation to the written component of an exhibit and rendering it more accessible for everyone.

CV2: What does truth mean to you? How would you define it with your experience of it in poetry?

NB: Truth is ridding self of excess. So is poetry.