What are your thoughts about participating in the POW! Festival as a Poet In
The School?

I love going into schools and talking about poetry and leading kids in exercises to show how poetry makes sense of the world.

Please tell us about your most recently published book and also a little
about any other books you've had that "saw print."

In her powerful new collection, Relay: A Series of Short Fictions, Betsy Struthers turns her poetic gaze on personal stories of joy and woe and how they overlap with others in ways we never imagine. Each of the 27 "micro-stories" is whole in itself, capturing a moment in which characters confront what time and chance has brought into their lives. Strung together into a larger narrative, Relay presents a picaresque, intertwined portrait of modern life in all its rich complexity.

Relay is my 12th book, following 8 books of poetry -- one of these , Still (Black Moss Press) won the 2004 Pat Lowther Memorial Award for the best book of poetry by a Canadian woman, while Running Out of Time (Wolsak & Wynn) won the Silver Medal, People's Poetry Award, in 1994. I have also had three novels published, the first of which, Found: A Body (Simon & Pierre) was short listed for the 1993 Arthur Ellis Best First Novel Award. In addition, I was co-editor (with Sarah Klassen) and contributor to a book of essays about teaching poetry, Poets in the Classroom (Pembroke Press).

As a Poet In The School, do you plan to solely read pieces from your book?
Do you plan to read other work as well?

I'm not quite sure what I'll do in the classroom. Depending on the size of the class I'd like to do at least one writing exercise. and will read some of my own work and perhaps some by poets who have influenced me (e.g., M. Atwood, D. Thomas)

How would you describe your poetry?

Imagist, feminist, landscape, language, love.

When did you start writing poetry and what prompted it?

I wrote poetry from an early age because I love the sound of words working together - my earliest influences were the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson's Garden of Verses and A.A. Milne's When We Were Six; my first published poem appeared in a Toronto school board publication for high school poets. The first published poet I met and showed my work to - an older, male poet - told me that "women shouldn't write poetry" and that I had no talent. To say this was discouraging is to put it mildly. I turned to promotion and advertising, working for a couple of book publishers, but the urge to write - the necessity to write - grew ever stronger. I had the fortune to meet
Dorothy Livesay, the eminent Canadian feminist poet. She was wonderfully supportive, gave me a huge list of books to read - "You can't write poetry if you don't read poetry," she said - and critiqued my early work. She encouraged me to take some classes in contemporary poetics, which I did. My first published poems appeard in two literary magazines about a year later; I continued to publish in literary magazines while working on my first book-length manuscript. My first book, Censored Letters, came out in 1984 and I have been publishing regularly since then.

What inspires you to put pen to paper / fingers to keyboard?

Things I've read/ heard/ dreamed/ experienced come together in an image and a line . sometimes when reading other people's poems a connection will be made and I will find my voice. Sometimes the rhythm of moving while walking my dog will jog ideas or random thoughts into words centred in the landscape I'm travelling through. There's no explaining how or why inspiration comes, but when it does, I have to drop everything else I'm doing to work on the poem.

Can you describe (a little) your writing process in creating a new poem?

I always begin with a line which sets the rhythm and image for the rest of the poem. I usually write a lot in my head - often while walking or doing the dishes or gardening - until I have the skeleton of the poem set. Then I sit down at the computer and write it all down - my handwriting is so bad that I can't see the poem properly until it's typed as line break and length is so important to the poem. I print out this first version and read it out loud. Usually the ending is the hardest part to get right, often because
until the poem is written out I'm not quite sure what it's trying to say. I re-write at least 20 times, usually starting at the beginning and going over and over the whole poem, reading it out loud at various stages so that the ear will catch clumsiness the eye doesn't always perceive. Once I feel the poem is done, I put it away for a few days, then come back to it - the time away from the moment of creation means that when I re-read it I can see its flaws and graces more clearly. I usually do a few more re-writes, then send it by email to a couple of poet friends for their reactions. I take their critiques into consideration and may do some re-writes or may decide the poem is as complete as it can be and so can be considered finished. Which is not to say that I don't go back and edit again later.

The POW! Festival is built on the notion that poetry should not be relegated to an existence as "a niche art form" that the average person doesn't care about. How do you respond to that?

I agree that poetry is much more than a niche art form, that in speaking of the world as it is it connects us to each other - the poet gives voice to the spirit of the moment.