For the first time this year, POW! includes poetry writing / performing workshops. What are your thoughts about facilitating a POW! Festival workshop?

I think it will be a lot of fun. I like the kind of creative process that you get going in a workshop setting; I like the energy it generates. I like how you end up writing things and coming up with ideas that you normally wouldn't have, if you were writing on your own, without hearing other people's work, or without input.

It really is a case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts, in this kind of situation.

And I think it's such a great addition to the POW! Festival roster. I think people are really going to want to participate--interactive events are always a good idea, I feel. And David Clink and I have run workshops together now on a fairly regular basis, so we've got our snake-oil patter down pretty good. Heh.

How would you describe your poetry?

That's a tough question. I never know how to talk about my own work without sounding like an insufferable wanker.

One of the things I hear most about my poetry is: "You know, I don't really like poetry, but I like your stuff." I've never been entirely sure how to take that, but I think I'll choose to firmly accept it as a rave review.

But seriously--I guess I write a lot of stuff that has a fairy tale or mythological basis. There seem to be a lot of strange beasts and talking bears, and wolves with, ah, intimate knowledge of Little Red Riding Hood. That kind of thing.

I don't tend to write really complicated poetry because, frankly, I don't have the patience to read it, so why would I write it?

When did you start writing poetry and what prompted it?

I believe I was a nervous and spotty teenager when I started writing poetry. There was a lot of moaning and wailing about how misunderstood I was and how deeply I felt everything. It makes me wince just to think about it.

I never actually set out to write poetry--I just sort of started writing down these little...vignettes? aphorisms? thoughts? and then they morphed into poems along the way. Actually, I didn't think I was writing poetry--I gave my little "pieces" to a couple of people to read, and they told me I was a poet.

There you go! If no one had ever told me, I still wouldn't know.

Is it your own creative writing that gives you the urge to help others with their writing process in workshops like these?

Frankly, teaching anybody anything bores the snot out of me, and I'm a terribly impatient person--so I don't really understand, and am in constant awe of, how the real teachers do it.

But what I DO like is this sort of collaborative workshop process. When, as the de facto leader(s) of the workshop, I/we can help the participants along the road to writing in general, and writing better if possible, I find that really revitalizing.

And when it's working well, and ideas are zinging around, you can almost smell the energy in the room.

One thing I do like to convey when "teaching" is my own ideas about creative process. In other words, that it's not some arcane function that you perform alone in your lonely office as you wrestle with grand ideas. What bullshit!

It's work, like other work, and it's not mysterious. You just have to sit down and do it--write, hammer out the words and sentences, edit, workshop, edit more, send stuff out, and sometimes it really sucks, but you just keep grinding at it, and sometimes it's astonishing and you actually feel pretty good.

But it's not some lofty or noble pursuit.

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?

Well, sure, ideally.

But I'm not sure how many takers you're going to have for that point of view, given that the general reading public either rolls their eyes when they hear the word "poetry" or runs screaming in fear.

If there was an easy way to make poetry accessible, I think that would be great.

I mean, like I said above, I tend to write fairly simply. But I think a very large number of poets believe that if they're not making things difficult to understand and ferociously obscure, then they're not doing their job.

Maybe that explains some of the convoluted verse I've had to read, which requires the Complete Oxford Dictionary, the ghost of Shakespeare AND several glasses of whiskey to decipher.

Who wants to work that hard? Not me.

I mean, if absolutely anyone can "get it," then it must not be very difficult to do, right? So you end up with an art form that is mostly appreciated by other creators of that same art form.

Which is too bad. Because it's not only novelists that are reading novels, is it? It's the reading public at large. If we could get that happening for poetry, how great would that be?

Maybe if we were taught from a young age that poetry doesn't have to be tedious. If we were shown non-tedious poetry on a regular basis.

But most educational systems are fairly hide-bound in the way they think and present ideas, so I'm not sure how much that's ever going to change.

And of course the other problem is that there is a lot of truly awful poetry out there.

I always brace myself at weddings when I hear that the bride and groom have decided to write their own vows--in verse! The horror! The horror!