Moving Through the Same Space: Interview with Natasha Ramoutar
Photo by Matthew Narea
Natasha Ramoutar is an Indo-Guyanese writer by way of Scarborough (Ganatsekwyagon) at the east side of Toronto. She has been published in The Unpublished City II, PRISM International, Contemporary Verse 2, Room Magazine, Living Hyphen and more. Her first book of poetry, Bittersweet, was published in 2020 by Mawenzi House.
In this interview, Canthius Digital Content Editor Manahil Bandukwala talks to Natasha about her new book, Bittersweet, her project, FEEL WAYS, and the importance of mentorship to a writer. This interview was conducted on Zoom and edited for clarity.
To learn more about Natasha, see her work on her website, follow her on Twitter @spondeee, and on Instagram @spondeee, and buy a copy of her book.
Manahil: Congratulations on your book, Bittersweet, and the launch! It was so wonderful – probably one of the best online events I’ve been to. You could really feel that Scarborough community even through an online event.
Natasha: Thank you so much for calling my event – and our event – that. I’m touched that you hold it in high regard and the warmth got through to you. My friend Daniela Spagnuolo from U of T Scarborough helped plan my launch. We had a chat about whether we want to do it webinar style or an open room. It was so important to me to let attendees go through and message each other in the room and see each other’s faces – I think that really adds to the way you can get closer to an in-person event. jaye simpson had a fundraiser earlier in the pandemic, and I remember how I could click through the room and we could unmute whenever we wanted, and how that made a difference.
My community of Scarborough writers is an interesting group. We know each other either through U of T Scarborough, or from community spaces. We’re writers working in different collectives and we run into each other at Scarborough arts events. If there were prizes or exhibitions, we would run into each other there. Since it’s a small community of artists and writers, and it’s rapidly growing, everyone knows everyone through someone. It often feels like a small community.
When we started out, being invited or going to readings was intimidating, especially for me. I wasn’t doing an MFA (Master of Fine Arts), so I wasn’t in those spaces in the same way. We always went out together. If one of us was on the line-up of an event in Toronto, five of us went. We commuted down or commuted home together because of the transit line. When we show up for each other, we show up very loudly. We would go into readings that had a professional feel, and when we entered the room, everyone would turn. Because we move as a pack, it takes the scariness off but also makes people turn their heads and see us as part of something bigger.
Manahil: I love how you describe it as a pack.
Your book is incredible. Reading it, I was constantly thinking about how there are poems I want to go back to.
I think of your statement about the absolute deconstruction and reconfiguration of time, and also about a poem you brought to a workshop we’re doing with Tess Liem. Why are themes of time important for you to explore in your work?
Bittersweet by Natasha Ramoutar. Photo by Sanna Wani
Natasha: Time has always been something of interest to me. I’m not 100% sure why I gravitate towards it, but I have since the earliest days of writing and storytelling. I feel like I’m relatively new to poetry. I primarily come from a fiction background. When I was a young reader, I was interested in narrative frame and how that shifts time. I’ve always been interested in stories that go non-chronologically. I think about the mystery genre where things are out of order and you piece them back together to get a full picture of what’s happening. When I came to poetry, that love of these different operating times moving simultaneously translated over. Early on, the collection was scattered poems and a lot of prose poems. For example, you have a poem like “Cartography I,” which is someone from the present time reaching for the past time. Then there’s something like “Brave New World,” where you again have someone reaching for the past, but this past is in story time and is set in a different narrative. So there’s all these layers of time working together.
The poems “Time I,” “Time II,” and “Time III” were me trying to anchor time in something and trying to pin down what it means to stretch a moment. Like when you get off the train and you pass someone and think that you don’t have enough time to say “hi,” but that acknowledgement is a reaction or marker of how we experience time.
Manahil: “Time III” is the one that has a specific reference to Kennedy Station. The second half of your book anchors in Scarborough. It reminds me of Adrian De Leon’s book Rouge and its use of transit.
Natasha: One thing I love that Adrian does in Rouge is snippets of conversations that happen when the train is running. It sets a precedent for what I’m doing in Bittersweet with the Scarborough poems. The nature of transit is that these moments are fleeting and in motion. The kind of language or snippets of dialogue in Adrian’s poems “Castlefrank” and “Broadview” are also a way of looking at time as this fleeting but conversational thing.
Manahil: The narrative arc of the book also has transit. It starts in Guyana, and travels to root itself in Scarborough. You write, “white men have wine game but no whine game.” I love that one!
Natasha: That always makes me laugh, because there are so many layers to the wordplay. Wine as in drinking, whine as in complaining, but also w(h)ine as dancing. The w(h)ine as dancing makes me laugh because there’s no consensus in the community about whether it’s spelled with an ‘h’ or without. I’ve seen different people of Caribbean descent spell it in a different way. That poem always feels like a joke or punchline to me, and I know the way I want it to be read might not be the way it is read. That is so typical of jokes and the double entendre you can pull from them.
Manahil: I think about “Tandem” and “Whose Mans,” and how the rhymes in those are so good. In “Whose Mans,” you have the Scarborough/Toronto/GTA way of talking, and it goes into the celestial.
Natasha: I love that those two things can exist side by side. In “Tandem,” I like the way the rhythm moves. There is a rhythm in the way we speak to each other. Throwing it back to a grade nine Shakespeare lesson, when I was taught that iambic pentameter is supposed to mimic the way we speak – we all have different rhythms in our voice. Meter wasn’t at the front of my mind during the writing process. But during editing when I was reading the poems back to myself, the language of the poems lent itself to a meter and rhythm.
Manahil: Having a book come out in a pandemic is tough, but I hope it’s been exciting for you nonetheless.
Natasha: It’s so touching to see how the work has been received. I’ve wanted my work to be in conversation with people, and also to spark inspiration in people. I love hearing about how my piece reminds others of a piece they wrote or similar themes they are grappling with. The pandemic has been a weird time to launch my collection, but Adrian was able to host my launch from L.A. If I launched in person, some friends wouldn’t have been able to attend.
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Manahil: What was putting together and submitting a collection like? Book publishing seems like a whole other world.
Natasha: To bring it back to the very beginning of it, when I wrote all these pieces, I penned down a phrase or idea that was bouncing around in my mind, then I would come back to it. When we talk about transit or those captured spaces, that’s where a lot of this collection was written. You can see that with how short some of the pieces are. I wrote these pieces in snatches of time. I looked back at my folder, and thought, “How do I have sixty pieces?” I felt like I had something there, but didn’t know what to do with it.
I had applied to different MFA programs, but hadn’t gotten in. I ended up doing my Masters of Professional Communication at Ryerson University instead. While doing that, I asked myself, “What was the big thing I wanted from the MFA?” For me, it was the mentorship. I wondered if anyone I knew was an arts educator and did mentorship on a freelance basis. If I could find the same service I was interested in.
I reached out to Sheniz Janmohamed –
Manahil: I love Sheniz!
Natasha: I love Shen too! We crossed paths multiple times. She did a workshop when I was an undergrad at U of T Scarborough. The first time I ever volunteered at the FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity) in Brampton, I sat through an entire event without realizing Sheniz was sitting beside me the whole time. We got to talking about how I was doing the Master’s program [at Ryerson] because I hadn’t gotten into the MFA. We parted ways again and would see each other here and there. She was the first person who came to mind for me. With the nature of her work and the way it travels, I knew she had the background and ability to understand where I was coming from as someone who wanted to write a multi-stop narrative.
Sheniz is such a skilled poet, and knows so much about form and sound and image. Image was my main focus. A lot of these poems come through as distilled images. I reached out to her and asked if she did manuscript consultations, told her about my project, and asked her for her rates. I also asked if she didn’t do manuscript consultations, could she point me towards someone who did. I knew I had something, but didn’t know where to take it. I wanted mentorship and guidance.
We worked together in the summer of 2018. During our meetings, we went through every single piece. We did line edits and looked at themes of time, tracing, access points, community, language, folklore, and ghost stories. With those themes, I found the grounding place for my collection.
Once we had the pieces together, we sat on the floor in her living room with every piece printed out. It was a fun exercise. For example, I remember thinking, “This one mentions heat, so over here we can put in the fire, and this one mentions soot, so that’s how it progresses.” If someone reads the book top to bottom, you can create this through narrative.
Manahil: I like reading books top to bottom because poets put so much work into where things go.
Natasha: This experience left me with a completely new outlook on poetry. So now I had a manuscript, but had to think about where it would go. Both Sheniz and Adrian had such great experiences with Mawenzi that I wanted to submit there. Sheniz helped me put together my query letter, and mentioned my manuscript to Mawenzi’s publisher, Nurjehan Aziz. It was a casual mention, and there was never a promise. I knew there was still the possibility that the work wasn’t ready yet. That was the process of getting the manuscript together.
I had taken one poetry workshop in my life prior to working with Sheniz. I loved reading poetry, but was hesitant to claim the title of “poet,” in part because of my lack of formal education in poetry. Working with Sheniz gave me a Poetry 101 in terms of learning form, how to self-edit, what makes a strong enjambment, the rhythm of lines, and more. These were skills I had been doing for years in my fiction writing, but hadn’t been aware of them as techniques. Before the mentorship, I didn’t have the language to call it what it was.
All the mentors or instructors I’ve had in my life have always been great in letting me take my own space. They let me argue or advocate for what I believe. Sheniz pulled these tools to the surface so I was aware of them, but never forced me one way or another. A mentor shouldn’t try to make you into a copy of them or stifle your voice. Daniel Scott Tysdal from U of T Scarborough is another person who approaches mentorship this way. I only ever took academic courses with him, but even through our creative writing circle, I saw Daniel have that same approach. And this is similar to how Tess runs our workshop.
Manahil: Everyone comes to the workshop with their own style and their own priorities with what they want out of their work. I love that with the editing, Tess asked us, “What are you looking for? What would be most helpful to you?
Natasha: In our workshop, everyone’s work is so different. Every submission is so unique. That is something beautiful about writing in general, but especially poetry. There are so many ways of approaching poetry, and all these ways are valid and valuable.
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Rouge by Adrian de Leon, Shut Up You’re Pretty by Téa Mutonji, and Bittersweet by Natasha Ramoutar. Photo by Natasha Ramoutar
Manahil: I want to talk about FEEL WAYS, an anthology of Scarborough writers launching in 2021, edited by yourself, Adrian de Leon, and Téa Mutonji.
Natasha: We’re booked for a Spring release, but also have other satellite projects we’re working on.
Manahil: You, Adrian, and Téa made the social media pages for FEEL WAYS, and the energy we talked about earlier came through on Twitter and Instagram.
Natasha: Thank you! With the print collection, we originally planned an earlier release. We faced delays, but we’re grateful for that because it meant that we had time to work on the nitty-gritty details. When we started, we had the idea to open the call for submissions, take a month or two to make decisions, and send out acceptances. We originally wanted to focus on the editing. Now, we’ve finished the editing, and our focus is on marketing and planning a launch. What does a launch look like for an anthology when all our contributors can have a voice? We have to think about the cover and blurbs. Launching in the spring gives us the time to put thought and care into how to showcase everyone in a fair way.
Manahil: Mawenzi was publishing it from the start?
Natasha: We were lucky to have a lot of staff at Mawenzi excited about the project. It’s so touching to have Mawenzi vouching for our work. Anthologies are more niche than single-author books. It is a risk to publish it, so that means a lot to us. Mawenzi being the publisher of mine and Adrian’s collections was another factor. I had signed my contract before we pitched the idea of FEEL WAYS. Myself, Adrian, and Téa are all emerging, having only one collection each to our name. That’s a risk as well. As editors, we’re not new to editing, but are new to the publishing world.
Manahil: What are the satellite projects?
Natasha: The first satellite project we applied for was Nuit Blanche. They have a grant for “Animating the Streets” through the Toronto Arts Council. We put together a separate team. I am so happy to have people with expertise on installation and artwork. Adrian, Téa, and I know words and project management. But equipment rental and permits, we knew nothing about. We have two producers, Mauriene and Tara. They’re multimedia artists, curators, and producers. They agreed to brainstorm with me as a FEEL WAYS rep about what a Nuit Blanche project could look like. We’re not sure what it’ll look like when fall 2021 rolls around, if we have to do an installation versus an online version. FEEL WAYS as a print anthology was about representing multiple voices and stories that were all different. How do we showcase Scarborough not as a single voice, but all these voices coming together? The Nuit Blanche project is that same idea of multiple stories moving through the same space.
For the second project, we were fortunate to receive a Canada Council for the Arts grant for a digital original project. It’s a mapping project. The Toronto Poetry Project from some years ago involved pulling poetry from inside the library and mapping it onto Toronto through geographical points. When we looked at it, we thought, “all the poetry is in downtown Toronto.” All the excerpts from Scarborough were about nature and how pretty the Bluffs look, or it was a narrative of violence. Those two stories are valid stories to the poets telling them, but there was a gap where we asked why we were distilled down to these two ends of a spectrum.
With all our projects, we want to put forward a poly-vocal narrative. A few pieces from the anthology will feature on the map, but we also tried to look beyond what we already had. We commissioned new work, specifically looking for Scarborough writers outside our pool. Who was overrepresented? How do we move to a different narrative? How do we move towards being more equitable with redistributing resources?
Manahil: That is so exciting! When is the map project going live?
Natasha: We hope for either the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021. We’ve commissioned all the pieces and are working on editing. The tricky part is the technical aspect of mapping the project. We’re bringing on another artist to create the map.
Manahil: The Toronto International Festival of Authors did a small press map. Would your project look something like that?
Natasha: It would be similar to that, except each piece would feature a segment, a bio, and some or all of the piece our authors had written. We want to use open source software, so someone else can replicate it. The work we’re doing with FEEL WAYS is not limited to our experiences in Scarborough. Within the GTA, there are communities grappling with issues of underfunding.
In my year prior to this collection coming out, I was fortunate to speak to poets and writers outside of Scarborough and the GTA. I’ve noticed this happening outside of geographical boundary. Even though we move as a Scarborough pack, we wanted to make a project that is able to be replicated by communities who need it.
When I was in Banff for a fiction workshop, Katherena Vermette was our mentor. I mentioned that I had finished reading David Chariandy’s Brother, and also that I loved Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough and Carrianne Leung’s That Time I Loved You. Katherena said she loved Brother, and felt a lot of resonance with the book growing up in Winnipeg. The way the communities there are treated and labeled. We read stories coming out of Scarborough and see similar experiences across pockets of Vancouver. This experience, unfortunately, is not unique. I say “unfortunate” because I want us all to have resources and to be able to tell our stories in the way we feel best represents us. Unfortunately, the situations in Scarborough are similar across Canada.
Manahil: David Chariandy’s most recent book, I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You, has similar themes as Brother, yet is in a completely different geographical place.
Natasha: Yes, I agree! These themes aren’t limited to one location.
In the past, I thought of writing as separate from other art forms. What I learn from the Scarborough community and how all artists come to find each other, is that work happening in a different medium is in conversation with other pieces. The resistance and making noise about our communities is something I’m seeing in exhibitions, murals, installations, music, and open mics. Similar themes run across our art forms.
Manahil: Thank you so much, Natasha. This was so wonderful, especially hearing about these other projects in the works.