CURRENT ISSUE

Of Death and Awakenings: Jenna Timmons-Oikawa interviews Jayli Wolf

I love the title and beginning of this piece, “goose tales.” The title leaves me with a sense I’m about to enter a fairy tale, possibly the awakening of a princess with a magical kiss. Instead, I’m introduced to a seance, “where bullfrogs wake the dead,” and the beauty of the thaw. The speaker knows winter in a way the geese never will, is there for not only the death but the awakening. With this change, there is a sense of belonging, juxtaposed with a sense of being stuck—a lovely push/pull. How did the poem evolve as you wrote it?

I was drinking my coffee down at the river when I heard the geese returning. The thought of them being unaware of the last season, and never really knowing winter in the way that I do, struck me. The title goose tales originally carried that fairy-tale softness you mention, but as I wrote, the poem showed me how much I wish I could leave for certain seasons too.

The séance image arrived from listening to the meadow on the walk home from the river, standing in the aftermath of winter and knowing what it costs to survive a season like that, even for the bullfrogs.

The geese can leave and return. The speaker stays. The frogs stay. There is belonging in that, an intimacy with cycles of death and awakening, but also a quiet entrapment.

The lack of capitalization in this piece is striking. As a reader, I felt like I was flowing through one long season. It leaves me wondering how structures like capitalization and punctuation play into your work, and into this piece? Do you have a hope for how your poem is read?

Instead of telling the reader where to pause or what matters most through capitalization, I wanted none of that. The lack of capitalization is a way of flattening the landscape, so everyone (frogs, geese, me) exist on the same plane for the spring.

Billy Collins has stated, “A poem is always searching for its own ending. And that’s what poets are thinking about. It’s not a search for insight, particularly. It’s a search to be over with.” Do you relate to this quote, and what is getting to the end of a piece like for you? How do you know a piece is finished?

That Billy Collins quote makes me laugh because it touches on the fatigue of writing, the part of you that just wants the poem to be done. I think some poems are searching to be over with. Others, not so much. For me, a poem ends when going further would start to feel like over-handling the material. I know a piece is finished when the ending changes the air in the room without explaining itself; when the poem feels like it can stand on its own and I can step away.

I’ve read that your father is a survivor of the Sixties Scoop, and that a lot of your work surrounds themes of identity and reclamation. As someone whose family member is also a survivor, my work is also often centred around identity. How did you enter into this dialogue with yourself, in terms of your writing, and what advice can you give to an emerging writer like myself who is also in this process of discovery?

I realized my writing was already circling my identity, whether I named it or not. From there, I made a deliberate choice to stop avoiding it and to meet those themes with honesty. Writing has become a way to listen to myself more closely and to allow personal and cultural history to inform how I work.

I am an emerging writer too. I would say, let your work be grounded in care. I am really just trying to focus on authenticity and craft.

Who are authors or artists that you are currently pulling inspiration from, and who is a writer you would most like to read this piece and get their thoughts, feelings, or impressions from?

I have been reading a lot of fantasy recently! A book I just finished is To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose, and I am absolutely stunned by her writing. I am a massive fan of hers, so I think it would be incredible if she ever read anything from me.

 

 

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