Kyeren Regehr, born Sydney, Australia, immigrated to Canada in 2002. She has twice received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, and served for several years on the poetry board of The Malahat Review. Her work has appeared in journals and anthologies in Canada, Australia and America, and her genre-bending first collection, Cult Life, was released with Pedlar Press in February, 2020.
Enlightenment may not be on everyone’s bucket list, but for the three hundred devotees of the Master Teacher, “awakening” was their singular purpose. Cult Life follows three years in the life of the poet as a twenty-something single mother whose spiritual devotion stood in juxtaposition to her search for worldly love.
Interviewed by Caley Byrne
Caley Byrne (CB): I read Cult Life in one breathless evening. There was such a dizzying disconnect, for me, between the striving towards truth and light and self-actualization on the one hand, and the banal daily actualities of working and serving and cleaning and mothering in that setting. Did you have to work hard to get that balance right?
Kyeren Regehr (KR): Thank you for saying that I got the balance right, Caley! The continual juxtaposition between the banal and the sublime was important to me. I was most interested in sustaining the tension that created—what happens to a twenty-something woman who deeply devotes herself to a spiritual path, but doesn’t deny the other elements of her humanness? (And who also has to balance single-mothering with unreasonable amounts of ashram service.)
I spent many long hours ordering the poems, tweaking the various arcs within the (quasi) narrative, considering the rate of revelation, intuiting what was missing. I’d tinker with/rewrite whole poems so they’d work where I wanted them in the overall narrative, maybe similar to a fiction writer re-writing sections of a novella, adding a scene, deepening an interior moment. Sometimes reordering the poems revealed that one of them wasn’t finished. I needed to balance the sexy poems with the transcendental pieces, and the working-serving-cleaning-mothering poems you mentioned. And the voices of the monologues needed breathing room, and similarly, the voice of the guru—which moves from believable to outrageous to dark—had to be adequately spaced. But it was also about pacing—writing a more cryptic lyrical piece to slow things down after a wild monologue, and taking the speaker into an interior place, for example. And not dropping any threads of story within the overall arc. I’m pretty visual, so I had to print and physically spread the manuscript out a lot. By the end, I’d periodically spread the entire thing across tables in coffee shops and libraries, even the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria where I occasionally worked. I once got in trouble for taking up all the teen tables at the Oak Bay Public Library.
CB: I’m curious what the writing process was like for you. Some of the situations and experiences were difficult to read about; I can’t imagine what it was like reliving them in writing. Did you write the material during your time at the ashram or afterward?
KR: I began the book during my MFA, over ten years after leaving the ashram. I’d been dredging my poetry files for some semblance of a thesis idea, puttering around writing nothing of interest for about five months, then one afternoon in a coffee shop a title edged into my mind, along with the first line, and I wrote “The Guru’s Feet” freehand on a scrap of paper. Then the floodgates opened. Almost seven years later, maybe two thirds of the thesis made it into the book, most of it greatly revised, and many newer poems having emerged. I don’t recall any of the material carrying difficulty for me—I think the big emotional processing happened before I began writing. The subconscious had done its dreaming, and mostly digested its grievances and grief. It’s a little strange when I hear that people find it difficult in places, and you’re not the first person to say that.
CB: In Path to the Inner Sanctum, you write the haunting line “only on my best days / am I worth saving”. Can you talk a bit more about this sentiment? What did it mean then and what can you say about it now?
KR:That’s one of my favourite couplets—I’m thrilled you described it as haunting, Caley. When it came to me, it felt like a haunting from my younger self, a ghost-thought. She was akin to The Fool in the Major Arcana, whistling up at the sky as she stepped off a cliff. Throughout the course of the narrative we watch her walk off the cliff over and over. She was pretty hard on herself when she fell—she didn’t meet her own expectations of what a devotee or a mother should be—I think that’s where the line comes from. I’m still tripping over the edge periodically, but I think the difference is that I now believe we’re always worth saving.
CB: You write about the memory of your grandparents giving a sense of safety multiple times throughout the collection. Why was this important to include? What did their memory offer throughout your writing this collection?
KR: My grandmother-character is an inner Wise Woman of sorts who holds the speaker accountable, or reminds her of what’s important. She’s an access point into the deep subconscious of childhood. That element of safety is there because the speaker wants to give her daughter what she had as a kid, and yet here she is in an ashram, away from her family. Maybe the grandparents represent a longing for sane guidance, and for family. But they also bring a little power and magic—perhaps it’s the remnants of a childhood magic, or maybe it’s a bit otherworldly. Interestingly, I didn’t ever set out to write about them—they first appeared in a revision of “Spell of Dislocation.” After that poem, they appeared when they wanted to, and they became the most surreal and mystical poems for me personally. They’re still a bit of a mystery to me, but it feels right that they’re in the book.
CB: Do you have a favourite poem in this collection? If so, which one and why?
KR: “Rupi” is my favourite monologue, partly because he’s a dear person, but also because the poem captures the way we all functioned in our particular roles (in a fervour of eccentric self-importance). But I recently read “Inventory” to an audience for the first time and I enjoyed its tongue-twisting rhythms. That poem took so long to revise that it feels like an achievement.
CB: In your acknowledgments you admit that “emotional truth and narrative arc must sometimes trump factual truth when crafting life stories into …literature”. Can you talk about how you deal with this dilemma when you write? How do you decide what to highlight and when – which angle to use – when it comes to choosing between emotional versus factual truth?
KR: In the initial revisions the poems decided how they preferred to sound, how much they wanted to hold, etc., and this often dictated varying departures from literal truth. For example, at the end of “Gloee” the speaker mentions a music box sold at a yard sale. In reality I kept that music box, but the end of the poem didn’t work—the music box wanted to be sold. The selling of it evoked the feeling of letting go, and of not knowing everything about the woman in the poem—that truth was more important.
As I approached publication, I had a whole ashram of people and their privacy to consider, so ethics factored in a bit when making choices. I occasionally swapped out some of the ashram’s odd vernacular for Sanskrit words that were available for Googling and thus more immediately accessible to a reader. The biggest changes were the reordering of events—but the written experience feels so close to truth that people who were there and have read the book don’t question the order or the real-life gaps. I had to work hard to create even a loose narrative arc, because life is less three course meal, more dog’s dinner all over the kitchen floor.