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There’s a Poem for That: Melanie Marttila + The Art of Floating
Poet Melanie Marttila tells us about the poetry books she’s loved lately, and her experiences working with fellow poet Tanis MacDonald on her own collection, The Art of Floating (Latitude 46 Publishing).
An interview with poet Melanie Marttila
All Lit Up: Can you tell us a bit about The Art of Floating and how it came to be?
Melanie Marttila: I’ve been writing poetry since the mid-nineties, when I was doing my undergraduate degree at Laurentian University and my poems have been published since 1996.
In 2015, when Latitude 46 stepped into the void left when Your Scrivener Press ceased operations, I approached publisher Heather Campbell about submitting a poetry manuscript. She encouraged me to submit a sample of my poetry, but it wasn’t until 2019 that I started gathering my work together into a manuscript.
My only thought was to put together a body of work that reflected my poetic career to that point. I divided it roughly into sections according to subject matter. There were the poems I wrote in Windsor while I was working toward my MA in English Literature and Creative Writing, moon poems, witchy poems, science poems, poems based in northeastern Ontario, and relationship poems.
I submitted a selection of my poetry to Latitude 46 in February 2021, when most of the pandemic lockdowns and restrictions started to ease, and a year later, Heather responded with a request for the full manuscript. I signed a contract with Latitude 46 in July of 2022.
At Wordstock Sudbury in November of 2022, I met Tanis MacDonald, and Heather and I asked her to be my editor for the collection. After that, I got fabulous new author photos taken by Gerry Kingsley, Heather and I asked my cousin, Gillian Schultze for her permission to use a digital print of one of her lovely fabric art pieces for the cover, and we’ve been steadily making progress toward the launch on April 6, 2024.
ALU: What has been your most unlikely source of writing inspiration?
Melanie Marttila: I’ve recently started working on a series of poems inspired by roadkill. Gruesome, I know.
Tanis MacDonald, in Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female, writes about a dead deer by the side of the road and how it becomes a metaphor for all those who suffer human violence, particularly women.
That chapter, “We, Megafauna,” got me thinking about all the dead animals I’ve seen over my lifetime. And some of the living ones. Now the series is evolving. I’m calling it Schrodinger’s Animals, because some of them are alive and some of them are not. You have to read the poem, witness, observe superposition, and allow it to collapse to find out what state the animal is in.
ALU: What are you most in the mood to read these days? Any poets you’re especially enjoying?
Melanie Marttila: Lunar tides by Shannon Webb-Campbell (Book*hug Press, 2022) explores grief, colonialism, kinship, and Indigenous resurgence. It’s divided into sections by the phases of the moon. I’m a lunatic (i.e., I’m obsessed with the moon), and this collection particularly spoke to me.
Vera Constantineau wrote a poetic memoir in Enlightened by Defilement (Latitude 46 Publishing, 2023). This collection of haibun, narrative vignettes paired with haiku, explores the poet’s life through the lens of the 108 defilements of Buddhism.
Kim Fahner’s lovely Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022), is a journey through the elements of water, earth, fire, and air to reach spirit, and then return homeward. Framed as an Irish immram, or journey to the otherworld, the poet seeks to own her life’s transformations fully.
ALU: What did you learn while writing your collection?
Melanie Marttila: In working with Tanis MacDonald, I learned that I am not precious about my poetry. This was surprising because I can feel possessive of my prose.
I had removed the geographical and thematic sections from my manuscript prior to submitting it to Latitude 46, but as I worked with Tanis, revising, removing, adding, and rearranging the poems in my collection, new sections evolved, and a new title based on a poem I wrote for my father. “The Art of Floating” took on more poignance after my father died in 2011, and now it’s the centrepiece of my debut collection.
ALU: If you were to set your collection to a soundtrack, what song is at the top of the listing?
Melanie Marttila: Feist’s “My Moon My Man.”
There’s a poem for the cats and birds…
“The Neighbourhood Stray” from The Art of Floating
The neighbourhood stray
has been
sleeping
on our porch.
I know because
he left me a
dead starling today.
The other starlings
congregated
on the roof
as if at a funeral,
their riotous dirge
cutting through
the patter of rain.
And I sit
offering my smoke
to the memory
of the dead.
* * *
Melanie Marttila has been writing since the age of seven, when she made her first submission to CBC’s “Pencil Box.” She is a graduate of the University of Windsor’s masters program in English Literature and Creative Writing and her poetry has appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, and Sulphur. Her short fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating Pups, and Home for the Howlidays. She lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.
Photo of Melanie credit Gerry Kingsley.
* * *
Thanks to Melanie Marttila for answering our questions, and to Latitude 46 Publishing for the text of “The neighbourhood stray” from The Art of Floating, which is available to order now (and get 15% off with the code THERESAPROMO4THAT until April 30!).
For more poetry month, catch up on our “there’s a poem for that” series here, and visit our poetry shop here.
