Neil Griffin is a poet, essayist, and former wildlife biologist. A former finalist for CBC’s Poetry Prize and two Alberta Magazine Awards, his writing has appeared throughout Canada, and Western Europe. He’s an MFA student at the University of Victoria, working on a book-length lyric essay about extinction.
Interview by Joey Scarfone
Joey Scarfone (JS): Do you have a daily practice of writing or do you only write when inspired?
Neil Griffin (NG): I write most days, but it’s not so structured nor so organized that I’d refer to it as a “practice”. I’m skeptical of types of writer-y regimes: X words a day or X hours a day. These might work for prose writers, working on marathon novels, but they strike me too much as a kind of Protestant drudgery. The rhythm of my writing is less granular, I think. I tend to have generative seasons: furious periods of fresh creation, interspersed with longer, slower periods of revision and contemplation.
JS: Do you prefer to write in isolation, like a cabin in the woods, or can you write in the big city environment?
NG: In an ideal life, I’d spend half the year in a small house in the foothills of the Rockies, half the year in a well-appointed apartment in Florence, and half the year in some tropical fishing village.
JS: That’s a year and a half but I get what you’re saying.
NG: Money and temporal impossibilities aside, I can write in most places. Realistically, if I were fussy about location I’d never get anything done. Writers seem to be natural experts at finding excuses not to write. I’ve never been a coffee shop writer. I often pace and speak out loud, while writing, which gets you strange looks in public places. The only thing I have no toleration for is industrial noise: construction, leaf blowers, lawnmowers. There is nothing on earth as antithetical to the idea of contemplative creation than some retiree mowing their lawn for the 3rd time that week.
JS: From what I read of your work it looks like you have a strong interest in nature writing. Is that an accurate observation or do you get inspiration from any where?
NG: In the American writer Jim Harrison’s memoir, “Off to the Side”, he lists seven obsessions that he felt had guided his life. Nature was one of his obsessions, and I’d say that it is one of mine too. It’s a slippery word, maybe a little too abstract. I’m not particularly interested in an agrarian nature, for example, or nature as a weekend retreat. What attracts me is wild places, or wild sensations, where the history of mankind seems to lay only gently on the land. What I want in art, and in life, is to move away from abstraction. To get closer to some wholeness of feeling or experience. Nature, however defined, is for me, one way to do that.
JS: Your metaphors are most compelling…. “he watches my clumsy arm wield a graceless machete, like a child’s first attempt at writing”. Did this just come to you or did you really have to think about it for a long time?
NG: I don’t think much about the origin of the images in my own writing. The best ones come naturally, from whatever source it is that art comes from. I think we’ve never bested the explanation of just calling it “inspiration”. Bad images, flat images, tend to be the ones that I’ve tried to concoct. A lot of writing is based on trust I think…trusting the subconscious, trusting inspiration, trusting that if you are honest and lucky you’ll be able, briefly, to dip your net into that cosmic stream of poetic force that moves past us. But I don’t want to try and stare too deeply into it.
JS: If a publishing company commissioned you to write a book about anything you wanted, what would it be?
NG: I wrote a proposal once for a book called “Thunder Road, A Road Trip Through The Death And Life Of The Bison”. I would like to write that book, still. I’m from the prairies, and harbour a great love for the Great Plains, and for bison specifically. The effort to kill them all intimately tied to colonization, ecological catastrophe, and the violence Europeans wrought in North America. The effort to reintroduce them now is perhaps a vision of a better future: of a reckoning with the past, of reconciliation, of a material answer to the question “what kind of a world do we live in”?
JS: Who are some of your influences?
NG: In prose: Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen. For their effortless erudition, Claudio Margis and Roberto Calasso. In poetry: Ted Hughes, Alice Oswald, Derek Walcott, Eugenio Montale. In both poetry and prose, Robert Krotsch. I find Anne Carson alternately inspiring and infuriating, which can be a useful fluctuation. I have no interest in writing a long novel, but I admire the long novels of Mathias Enard.
JS: How many years have you been writing and how is your style evolving?
NG: My mom said that she knew from a young age that I would be a writer, because of how much I loved telling lies. It’s ironic that I mostly write poetry and non-fiction now, the two genres least openly associated with lying. I’d always scribbled, but I didn’t really start taking writing seriously until I was in my mid-20s. I was in graduate school studying biology, and needed an outlet from the dour seriousness of numbers and charts. My style, such as it is, has become less imitative. My earliest poems are often clear studies of, say, Seamus Heaney. I think you can still read my influences in my writing, which I am happy with: art is a kind of giant family tree, it’s useful to know where you come from. I am also more comfortable with an amorphous exploration of form.