On Land and Writing: Interview with Douglas Walbourne-Gough

All Lit Up: We read that your newest collection Crow Gulch is your attempt to both honour Crow Gulch and to remind Corner Brook of its absence in social history. Can you tell us more about that?Douglas Walbourne-Gough: The community of Crow Gulch existed less than two kilometres from downtown Corner Brook yet, until recently, it was virtually unknown to much of Corner Brook’s population. There’s very little written about the place, outside of municipal documents, the odd newspaper clipping, and two pieces of fiction—Percy Janes’ 1970 novel House of Hate (actually a great book and a must-read for anyone from or living in Corner Brook) and a short story from Tom Finn’s 2010 collection, Westsiders. Both speak quite negatively about the place and people of Crow Gulch so one of the aims of my book is to offer a counter-narrative. More generally, I simply wanted to remind Corner Brook that Crow Gulch was here. In the case of many younger Corner Brook residents, there was no knowledge of Crow Gulch’s existence at all. My father’s family and many others lived, worked, loved, suffered, and celebrated there. As the recent CBC Atlantic radio doc “Crow Gulch Was Here” illustrates, there was a stigma surrounding the people and place of Crow Gulch—I hope that this book can serve to dispel that. I offer it not as an authority but to add a facet of context and humanity that was missing from the existing narrative and history.ALU: Given that Crow Gulch is a debut collection, was there anything particularly challenging about the writing process? What did you love about it?DWG: Quite challenging, yes. I started working on these poems in 2010. Since then, the book’s become about the community of Crow Gulch; about my grandparents’ and my father’s place in that community; about Land as both a place of healing and as its own character within the book; about poverty, trauma, and stigma; about identity; and, finally, about my own place within the story of Crow Gulch. This evolution took the necessary time, reciprocity, emotional and mental energy, and care to tell this story with love and responsibility. This was no easy process (there was a year or so where I buried the manuscript out of fear of failure) but I’m very pleased with both the book and the person I’ve become because of it.I love what it’s taught me about patience, about my practice as having the potential to do work far bigger and more important than myself, and the lesson that this sort of undertaking is never accomplished alone. So many people have helped carry me here. The community I’ve found through all the writing, research, workshopping, readings, the editing and publishing process, and touring has been incredible. I love the love that’s been shown to me and I offer it right back. ALU: Who are your major literary influences? Who are you reading now?DWG: Initially, this book was a blatant imitation of John Steffler’s The Grey Islands and George Elliott Clarke’s Execution Poems. John was actually my first writing mentor. I guess the easiest way to talk about influences is to mention books, in addition to the above mentioned, that have shaped me: Sue Goyette’s Ocean; Dean Young’s Fall Higher and The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction; Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth; Eden Robinson’s Trickster novels; Don McKay’s Night Field and Vis a Vis; Emily Nilsen’s Otolith; both Bluets and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson; Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey; Adele Barclay’s If I Were In A Cage I’d Reach Out For You; Shannon Webb-Campbell’s I Am A Body Of Land; Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires; Robin Richardson’s Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis and Sit How You Want; Cecily Nicholson’s Wayside Sang; Mary Dalton’s Merrybegot; Stan Dragland’s Strangers and Others: Newfoundland Essays; Sara Tilley’s Duke; and a few dozen other texts that I don’t have room to list.I just finished reading, and loved, Dominique Béchard’s debut collection One Dog Town. It feels, to me, as if Karen Solie’s thousand-yard prairie stare was distilled into an oak tree, being observed at 3am, alone, through a Northern Ontario window. Lindsay Bird’s debut, Boom Time, is another I’ve really been enjoying (and had the pleasure of reviewing). I’m really looking forward to Adéle Barclay’s Renaissance Normcore, devoured Megan Gail Coles’ Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, have been re-reading Shazia Hafiz Ramji’s Port of Being, Heather Nolan’s This Is Agatha Falling, and can’t wait to read Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild. Oh, and Stan Dragland’s forthcoming literary criticism text, The Difficult.ALU: What outside of poetry informs your work?DWG: Land. Particularly, Southwestern Newfoundland. I didn’t have the perceived typical Newfoundland upbringing of being on the ocean. I grew up inland, roaming bogs and hills and ponds, canoeing and trouting, picking berries, rabbit-catching and moose hunting. I fell out of touch with that as a teenager but when I got to my mid-twenties I discovered that I loved hiking so the southern shore of the Bay of Islands became my playground as did Gros Morne National Park. Newfoundland is old, and that rock is powerful. When I walk into a place like Cedar Cove or look out onto Guernsey Island I can feel that power move through and stay with me.In the last few years, though, it’s been people. All my grandparents are gone, both my grandmothers by the time I was 14. There’s so much more that Crow Gulch could have been if my father’s parents were alive but the book is also my love letter to them. My grandfather visits me in dreams and I have been working on another poem about that just this past week. I hope that if I keep writing to them that my grandmother will visit me as well. I can’t recall the sound of her voice and this breaks my heart. Much work to do.* * *Douglas Walbourne-Gough is a poet and mixed/adopted Mi’kmaw from Corner Brook, Newfoundland. His poetry has appeared in journals and magazines across Canada and he’s recently found some success writing reviews and essays. His first collection, Crow Gulch, is published with Goose Lane’s icehouse poetry imprint. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC Okanagan and is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at UNB Fredericton.* * *Thanks to Douglas for chatting with us! Crow Gulch is available now on All Lit Up.