Patricia Young Interview

Following Patricia Young’s poetry reading at the University of Waterloo (hear it here!), she gave TNQ the opportunity to pick her brain in a short Q&A.

You have three poems appearing in the upcoming Lists Issue of The New Quarterly. Each one begins with a quote from Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1933). How did you get interested in the British sexologist’s work?

Back in the early nineties, my daughter’s elementary school was moving its library from one building to another, and in the process throwing out a lot of books. One day while picking up Clea, my husband saw these old brown books at a free-for-all table. He brought them home and they turned out to be the seven volumes of Havelock Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex. I thought anything written about sex at that time had to be interesting, and indeed it was.

I found the books fascinating for a number of reasons: Ellis was writing at the end of the Victorian era, a time of sexual repression, and he was the first person to explore the subject of human sexuality in a non-judgmental way, leaving morality and religion right out of it (except when he was talking about religion, but that was a different thing). He drew deeply from history and cultures throughout the world, and I was struck by his open-minded approach to all sorts of things, including homosexuality, which of course was illegal and considered a perversion at the time. I also loved his almost god-like perspective on the human race. He wrote about humans the way someone would write about any species they were fascinated with — animal or insect or bird. Ellis’ writing is also very elegant and poetic, and though I kept coming across stunningly poetic phrases I didn’t know what to do with them. I did write one poem called “The Origins of the Kiss” inspired by a chapter on the universality of the kiss, and then I shelved the books. But then a few years ago, I decided to try using quotes that caught my attention for one reason or another as triggers and writing poems off them. Often this approach didn’t work, but some of the poems have stuck.

Sexuality clearly plays a prominent role in much of your recent work. You tackle sexually intimate topics and experiences in a very public way. When you put pen to paper and write a poem like “The Littlest Orgasm,” how do you get past your own inner prude?

There is an irony in this because, yes, I do consider myself a bit of a prude. My younger sister would certainly say I am, and our mother was Scottish Presbyterian after all. However, I like to think that my interest in sex is more anthropological and poetic than prurient. To answer your question about how I get past my inner prude, I would say that age allows me to write about sexuality in a way that I wouldn’t have or couldn’t have when I was young. My perspective is much different from that of a twenty year old caught up in the swoon of it, and I’m also not writing about my own sex life.

I understand your husband, Terence, is also a writer, and you’ve passed the writing bug onto your children, as well. What’s it like to live in such a literary family?[1]

People ask how I feel when my children write about me. How do Liam and Clea feel when I write about them? How does Terence feel when I write about him? How do I feel when he writes about me?

It’s a tricky business, I say. Every family draws lines in the sand. You can go this far but no farther.

If the mother in Clea’s story is a depressed psychiatrist who flies into a rage every time her daughter uses the clothes dryer, that’s okay with me. If the wife in Terence’s story is a pot-smoking, laser-tongued misanthrope, that’s also okay with me. I understand: I am not all mothers, all wives. If the vegan mother in Liam’s story sparks a family feud because her visiting brother-in-law innocently fries up a few strips of bacon (This house is a meat-free zone, for Christ sake! How could you not know that?), it has to be okay.

If it weren’t, none of us could write.

The best and worst thing about being married to a writer is the feedback. More specifically: the brutally honest feedback.

Having decided to try writing fiction, I heard voices all the time, lucid, demanding voices with stories to tell. Unfortunately, I lacked the skill to get them down on the page. The years of writing poetry had not prepared me for the task of writing fiction. I was enthusiastic, but inept, and, impatient.

I gave Terence a draft of something I was working on and after he’d read it I saw the pain in his face. He offered a few suggestions, but it was clear he thought the story was dead in the water. I was hurt and frustrated and defensive and demanded he explain himself more fully, but he sensed, quite rightly, that whatever he said from then on would be the wrong thing, and so he refused to say anything.

This is not the first time you’ve granted TNQ an inside scoop on your working mind. Your interview with Barbara Carter in Issue 110, “Last Poems”, ends with you discussing the differences between writing fiction and writing poetry. You said that “writing fiction broke the poem open” and offered you a larger poetic canvas. When an inspiration or an idea comes to you, how do you decide if it’s best suited to poetry or fiction? Or is this internal recognition so natural that it’s hardly a decision at all?

I seem not to be able to work in two genres at once. When I started to write fiction in 2000, I didn’t write poetry at all. For seven years I couldn’t write a poem for the life of me in fact. Now that I’m writing poetry again I am not writing fiction (can’t for the life of me). I seem to become immersed in whatever I’m working on. It’s what I read, think about, talk about. I know people who can move with ease from one genre to the next, but I am not one of them.

[1] Patricia’s response to this question is taken from her essay “The Writing Family: Trimming the curtains the length of light,” published in Constance Rooke’s “Writing Life” (McClelland and Stewart).