Tawahum Bige, a Łutselk’e Dene, Plains Cree poet with a BA in creative writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University, has had poems featured in numerous publications. Their debut, Cut to Fortress, came out in 2022, followed by Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells in 2025. Bige lives in Vancouver, B.C.
Stages of Tanning Words and Remembering Spells is a stark plunge into how voice forms for a young Two Spirit poet growing up far from their Łutselk’e Dene territories. From whisper to holler, each poem reveals the raw mechanics of expression, charting a path from childhood to adulthood through survival, self-discovery, and the need to speak to exist.
Interviewed by Loch Baillie, Plenitude Magazine
Loch Baillie (LB): Much of your collection is anchored in nostalgia. Take, for instance, the poems “Making a Nerd…,” “Crash and Spyro,” and “Chooser,” which deal with the good, the bad, and ugly of growing up as in the 1990s/early 2000s. What role does memory play in your art?
Tawahum Bige (TB): I see a lot of the poetry I write as a portal into a memory. To find one solid image or recollection from a spot that tells a greater story of what my life entails. Working through these memories is where I find healing, especially in writing “Crash and Spyro” where I tried to piece together what parental figures I latched onto in the wake of neglect. But I also don’t want to ever just show myself like I see me as victim—rather, a flawed human living a flawed life. To take myself from victim to active participant in my own world and history feels a lot more rewarding, emotionally.
LB: For me, one of the most evocative poems in Stages of Tanning Words is “Attention Deficit.” This is a piece full of questions and confessions that provide a candid portrait of living with ADHD. Can you talk a bit about the intersection between neurodivergence and poetry and why it was important to you to write about your ADHD not only in this piece, but throughout the entire collection?
TB: Not to write “about” my ADHD. I just wanted to organize the chaotic. To find an order to a mind that feels in constant states of disarray. “Attention Deficit” explores how fragmented and disjointed my thought-stream is. I think the biggest thing for me is that I’m just writing my experience, and it coincides with a lot of mental health issues I absolutely am still working through. If I didn’t write through that processing, for how I wrote the poetry of this collection, I would feel dishonest.
LB: At the very beginning of the section “Holler,” you write: “…the first thing i learned in life / was my greatest weapon is my voice.” Now with two full-length collections under your belt and several years of spoken word experience, what role does voice play in your creative process? How did the vocal, performance aspect of your career play a part in your writing of this second collection?
TB: I love this question. Yes, voice is everything in my career. I began as a spoken word poet trying to gather their voice to tell a unique experience. This meant purging my built-up bullsh** that I gathered over years of hearing cliché and unevocative art. This meant really interrogating how a voice develops, including asking Saul Williams at a master-class, “how do you develop voice,” to which he replied, “you just keep writing. Every day.” So I did. And started to notice my own unique voice emerge, and as it did, so did the inquiry to find out what voice means for me. Using it as the concept for this collection meant finding those specific ways that I speak and describe events, to think of how I spoke before and how it came to be. Every poem in that book has been read aloud before it was in the collection— I’m sure this is not a unique characteristic, but it does mean I have figured out which ones were meant to be loud, which ones were meant to be whispered.
LB: There are various references throughout your book, whether that is video game characters, film and book series, names of specific places, or other working artists (such as Julian Randall and Alessandra Naccarato). Who or what is inspiring you and your writing these days?
TB: Coming out of a slump, I’ve lately been very inspired by a heavy metal group called Stray from the Path and their album “Euthanasia” which has a lot of very hefty lyrical content that calls out the police state and colonialism. Then, there’s a rap group called Grim Salvo who collaborate with Witchouse 40k: they spit rap that world-builds a dark landscape of vampires and werewolves which is the world they articulate their struggles through. I am particularly interested in work that would likely not have been seen positively by my community during my education.
LB: Stages of Tanning Words’ five sections are titled using verbs: cry, whimper, holler, laugh, and whisper. Can you talk a bit about how you decided on the order of your poems and why verbs—specifically, ones that often evoke wordless, emotional responses—are significant to the structure of your collection?
TB: Voice to me is a very active being. It’s engaged in motion, in movement (or the lack-thereof). Many folks are disconnected from an active way of being in the world, which is to use their voice to impact the world around them. It’s not about choosing verbs to evoke those wordless, emotional responses— it’s recognizing the writing of them to be the form of speaking. To evoke wordless, emotional responses is to be using voice to cry, whimper, holler, laugh, whisper or any of the other major ways we use our voice.
LB: Your book’s subtitle reveals that it is part one of a larger project. What can we expect from part two? Will there be more than two parts?
TB: I hope it’s just a second part! I won’t spoil all of the section titles, but there’s space for more of the nuance in voice. Particularly excited for the political undertone that will be in sections that explore utter quiet, or what it’s meant to be forced into that quiet—how those off-shoot aspects also inform how voice develops.