Bird on a Wire

Katherine Lawrence chats with us about the lasting impacts of divorce in our latest Quatrain Questions interview

1. Black Umbrella takes children of divorced/separated parents (and infidelity) as its subject matter, which is a uniquely traumatic experience for young people, especially as they grow into adulthood. Having lived through this reality yourself and come through on the other side, what was the experience of writing this collection and revisiting these memories like for you?

Each of my five books examines yet another layer of my family’s breakdown. Divorce marked me and became my defining subject as a writer.

My challenge in writing Black Umbrella as poetic memoir was to move dream fragments, memories, and contemporary family theory into the realm of poetry, specifically the long poem, or interconnected poems. The process was exhilarating and exhausting. For example, how do I write about childhood rupture without using that term? What came through to me, what I felt as pressure at the centre of my chest as I wrote, was the sense of explosion, of an earthquake. That’s what you find in sections 4 and 5 of “Liminal.” I fused recollected facts with imagination. The dream about the Japanese schoolgirl is my creative imagining. The facts live in the colour and pattern of the bedspread, the red thread, the action of making a bed, the science lesson in school, the mimeographed maps.

I return again and again to that singular rupture. It’s an echo, a trail of smoke. The memories linger.

2. Despite ample opportunity to do so, the book never strays into a ‘how to’ narrative of building a ‘successful’ relationship (it instead stays firmly planted in memoir). Was this a conscious decision? If so, why did you choose to avoid telling that particular side of the story? 

I’m a writer. It would never occur to me to turn my experience with family breakdown into advice for someone else.

It was my editor, Winnipeg poet Di Brandt, who encouraged me to get brave about this work. With Di’s support, I recognized the importance of contributing to the divorce narrative. Much has changed since my parents divorced in 1969, the year Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon. I continue to meet men and women whose parents’ divorce is more recent and through conversation I discover that we share many of the same experiences. Aside from the prevalence of divorce, not a lot has changed. We struggle with shame and various degrees of depression. Many of us develop complicated ideas about money because there is almost always financial stress in a divided family. Some experience self-harm, and many harbour the outrageous fantasy that our parents will one day get back together. Others struggle with commitment issues. These issues are all documented by health professionals. Now it’s time for poets to add their voices. Black Umbrella is my contribution to the discussion.

3. The poem “Still Life Inside the Domestic Triangle,” in which the speaker views an art exhibit on Mary Pratt, harkens back to something you said in a previous interview for Never Mind (https://www.turnstonepress.com/aotm-author-of-the-month/aotm-katherine-lawrence.html), in which you explain that you are drawn to the domestic world as a way to “investigate love,” and ask “what creates love, what holds love, and what destroys love.” What conclusions, if any, have you arrived at following the examination of your own family in Black Umbrella?

 Mary Pratt’s work has always held my attention because she uses the home, the domestic world of women, men, and children, to suggest that everything is not always what it appears to be. I grew up in a home where appearances were critically important because there was so much to hide. It’s why I spend a lot of time mining for just the right image. Once I find that image - a row of brass buttons, a white shirt, gold wall-to-wall carpet, a black umbrella – I stand back and let the image do the speaking. That is, the image can suggest sub-text.

I learned to respect the power of the image as I wrote these poems. The work taught me to trust the dialogue between my conscious and unconscious mind.

4. In the same interview, you explained that “As a writer, I believe in happy beginnings but I’m suspicious of happy endings,” which seems to be a kind of residue from the domestic upheaval depicted in Black Umbrella. What are some of the other ways your family has informed your poetics?

I think that the “happily ever after” story leads to a lot of trouble for a lot of people because it suggests that life is incomplete without romantic love. It’s for this reason that I’m interested in writing from a place of ambiguity. It seems to me that love asks us to embrace uncertainty.

I chose to conclude the book with the poem, “Primary Colours” because every line speaks to love. Love endures, though not always in ways that we imagined. I love the broken among us./ I love my mother’s cursive hand./ I love the homes my daughters own, nearby./ I love the nearby.

Black Umbrella by Katherine Lawrence

Now available online and at book stores near you