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CoCoPoPro: Kathy Mac and the art of Dog-Nannying
We’re on day 26 of our Coast-to-Coast Poetry Project, and we’re going to spend our last few days of National Poetry Month exploring the East Coast. For more than five years, poet Kathy Mac had the most unique job–she was a dog nanny. She lived in Sambro Head, Nova Scotia, and she took care of anywhere from four to twelve English setters, which belonged to writer, scholar, and environmentalist Elisabeth Mann Borgese. The Hundefraulein Papers (Roseway Publishing, 2009) are poems both playful and refined dedicated to exploring our special bond with dogs.
We’re on day 26 of our Coast-to-Coast Poetry Project, and we’re going to spend our last few days of National Poetry Month exploring the East Coast.
For more than five years, poet Kathy Mac had a most unique job—she was a dog nanny. She lived in Sambro Head, Nova Scotia, and she took care of anywhere from four to twelve English setters, which belonged to writer, scholar, and environmentalist Elisabeth Mann Borgese. The Hundefräulein Papers (Roseway, 2009) are poems both playful and refined dedicated to exploring our special bond with dogs. The collection is also a careful and touching homage to Borgese, and a carefully observed biography of sorts of Borgese’s last days.
Q&A with Kathy Mac
What are you reading right now?
Mark Lavorato’s Wayworn Wooden Floors and Michael Lithgow’s Waking in the Tree House.
If you wrote a memoir what would it be called?
One Word After Another
Where is the oddest place in which you have ever written (or been inspired to write) a poem?
In a bathroom in a bar in Bogata, from which I was flushed out by my friends who feared I’d been kidnapped. In a sugarcane field in Northern Pakistan. On a busy street corner in Gorakpur, India, where my left-handedness attracted a boisterous but friendly crowd.
Why should people read poetry?
For the love of it. But it’s an acquired skill; you have to read it to get comfortable reading it, and so, many people don’t.
Who are your favourite poets?
My head is teeming so hard with this question, it’s like they’re all stuck in the door and no one of them can get out. But I’ll limit myself to Atlantic Canada, shall I? Sue Goyette, Anne Simpson, Carole Langille, Shauntay Grant, Michael Crummey, Richard Lemm, El Jones, Mary Dalton….
What’s one poem everyone should read?
Oh. I hate to be so old school, but my training was in 19th C literature, so I’d have to say Tennyson’s "Ulysses." Were the words "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" declamed by a hale hero defying the passage of time? Or mumbled by an amnesiac Alzheimer’s patient relegated to his stool by the fire?
What’s your must-read literary magazine or website?
What’s your guilty pleasure (when it comes to reading)?
(Ulp. True confessions time) Lois McMaster Bujold’s space operas and fantasy fiction.
When did your interest in reading/writing poetry start?
In utero, I suspect
*****
Kathy Mac teaches at Saint Thomas University and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in 2002 for Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth. When Kathy Mac, ronin romantic and Hundefräulein Emeritus, is spotted striding across the barrens around Sambro Head, Nova Scotia, she is generally trying to keep a variable number of dogs in sight while musing on the twisted paths that led a confirmed cat afficionado into such constant caninity.
_______Edited from the original post, published on the LPG blog
