Embodied Movement: Interview with Selina Boan
Selina Boan.
Selina Boan is a white settler-nehiyaw writer living on the traditional, unceded territories of thexʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-waututh), and sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) peoples. Her debut poetry collection, Undoing Hours, was published in the spring of 2021 by Nightwood Editions. Her work has been published widely, including The Best Canadian Poetry 2018 and 2020. She has received several honours, including the 2017 National Magazine Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the 2020 CBC Poetry Award. She is a poetry editor for CV2 and Rahila’s Ghost Press.
This conversation took place on January 13th, 2022, and has been edited for length and clarity. In this interview, Digital Content Editor Manahil Bandukwala talks to Selina about her book, Undoing Hours, community, editing, and writing/leaning into clichés.
Manahil: Hi Selina, it’s lovely to be talking to you today!
I want to start out by talking about community. I visited Vancouver a few years ago and witnessed a bit of what the poetry community is like there. We’ve also both lived in Ottawa at different points in our lives.
Selina: What struck me about living in Ottawa and being involved in the poetry community was how welcoming everyone was. What makes meaningful, artistic, and creative spaces is empathy, care, and embracing folks who want to play with language or experiment. I loved the playfulness of open mics. When I was starting out, open mic nights created a space where no matter where you were in your career as a writer, you could share poems and get feedback.
Manahil: I take it for granted that poetry events have open mic nights. The first place I read was at Tree Reading Series in Ottawa. When I started out as a poet and I had maybe one poem. An open mic was a nice place to share my writing.
Before we officially started the interview, we were talking about Sanna Wani, who is a poet and good friend of mine. Sanna and I initially met online, then in person, and now we’re great friends and have these nerdy poetry conversations all the time.
Selina: That's so special. I'm so excited for Sanna’s book, My Grief, the Sun. I absolutely love her work. I had the privilege of publishing her poems in the new issue of Room. One of the poems, titled “reaching for my grief, the sun,” is a visual poem. As soon as I read the poem I thought, “this has to be in the issue.” I was introduced to her work when I saw her do an online reading and afterwards I sent her a message because I felt so uplifted and inspired. Sometimes poetry can feel so small in the world; it is a fairly niche readership, so sharing a love of poetry with others is incredibly special.
Manahil: In the second year of my undergrad, I found your chapbook in the office of In/Words Magazine, a small press run out of Carleton University’s English department at the time. I didn't know who you were at the time, but I picked the book up and read it. It was so good! I mentioned the chapbook to Chris Johnson (I think), and he said “Selina, yeah, she's amazing.” You wrote this work and maybe forgot about it, but some time later I found your chapbook and it had an impact on me.
Selina: I definitely did not forget! Actually, I’ll speak to the impact of publishing that chapbook. Ottawa was the first place I began to identify as a poet. I couldn’t believe people were calling me a poet, and it made me feel like I belonged somewhere. And to be honest, I had never really experienced that feeling before.
That impacted the direction my life took, doing my MFA at UBC and connecting with some incredible writers in what we colonially call Vancouver. I've always had an appreciation for my writing communities, and I’ve really missed parts of those communities as we’ve moved to online spaces.
Manahil: I miss meeting people in person, but I also think there’s something empowering about moving to online spaces and making communities more accessible.
Selina: Online spaces have connected me, and I think, others, with people you're not necessarily in the same city as. I’m interested in the poetics of place and space. It’s interesting to think about that in an online context as well.
Manahil: When your book launched, you read with Molly Cross-Blanchard and Dallas Hunt. The first issue I edited for In/Words published one of Molly’s poems, and that was how I was first introduced to her work.
Your book launch was the first time I'd actually heard Molly read out loud after encountering her work in magazines for several years.
Selina: Molly is an incredible poet. During the editing process for my book, she and I became very close because our books were released at the same time. We both edited and helped each other with edits and the order. Molly is the kind of editor who pushes your work to do more. That is a hard skill that not everyone has.
In my poem “ongoing conversations with nitôn” – Molly pushed me and this poem turned out so much better because of her feedback. She breathed new life into the poem in a way I needed. There's a line in the poem where I say, “it's okay to wonder, are we going to be okay?” In editing, Molly said that was one line she wasn't sure about, but if I wanted to keep the line I could. In that case, I did end up keeping the line. But now, funny enough, it’s a line that bothers me. Molly had this foresight into my work.
Manahil: In my editorial process for my forthcoming book, my editor Cecily Nicholson never said, “you need to change this.” Instead, she said, “I'm going to talk about your work, what I see, and what I think you're trying to do.” That’s the kind of editing that brings out what you intend for your work to do.
Selina: What did she observe about your work?
Manahil: A lot of the book talks about sex education and abortion. I wrote some of these poems when I was 20, and had this university-feminist mindset. Cecily pointed those parts out and talked to me about language choices, and especially alienation. Those parts needed fixing, and now are much stronger.
Selina: It’s helpful when a theme is identified and you're guided towards deepening that theme. Quite a few poems in my book are older poems. There are some that I edited, as well as a few I tried not to touch too much because I did want them to represent where I was in the moment of writing to fit with the arc of the book itself which was, in large part, the quintessential debut book that features cliches about identity and learning.
Manahil: I resonate so much. It’s difficult when language and learning have fallen into this space of cliché. Your experience isn't something that can be reduced to being cliché.
Selina: I love the idea of resisting that narrative of cliché, of taking an image, idea or a familiar feeling and then twisting it a little.
Manahil: A lot of my early poems are from when I just moved to Canada, so the poems fall into this diaspora cliché. A lot of those themes are present in my full-length collection, but I want to think they’re nuanced.
Selina: I just finished editing an issue for Room that I'm really proud of. Everyone in that issue is absolutely fantastic. Conversations that I had with myself as an editor and with the editorial team was about pushing back against ideas of what we think poetry is, in a more conventional sense. What poems do we elevate and how does this impact the landscape of what we perceive as “poetry”?
I was reading about your project, Reth aur Reghistan, that you have with your sister around folklore. I'm planning to use your website for my practicum because I’m doing a unit on storytelling. I love what you said about how these stories change as folks move globally. When I read about how your project considers how folklore shifts and changes, especially between languages — my brain exploded. That fascinates me.
Manahil: Three poems from Reth aur Reghistan appear in Room’s “Ancestry” issue, edited by Serena Lukas Bhander. Poems from the manuscript have been difficult to publish because they feel so locked into a specific context, so it’s incredibly meaningful that Room took that leap.
Selina: Emily Riddle is also a language learner, and has talked about using language only when she needed to, when a word doesn’t exist in English. That’s something that I've reflected on while writing my book. My dream was to write a poem to my kookum, because she doesn’t speak English. That was the goal I had set out in my language learning journey. I didn't come anywhere close to that, because the reality of language learning is incredibly difficult but I have been thinking about how we represent ourselves and our culture and being more intentional with my use of nehiyawewin.
Manahil: There are ways language shows up in poetry even when the poem itself is in English. I’ve grown up speaking Urdu but write entirely in English. But having access to Urdu poetry and music means these aspects show up in my writing.
Selina: Language is imparted in the way that you think and present yourself. I'm in the professional year of an education program to become a teacher and in classes with an Indigenous cohort over the summer, we talked about how the British Columbia government has mandated conventions around incorporating Indigenous knowledge into curriculums. A lot of people approach Indigenous knowledge from the perspective of content rather than as a way of being and practising. Indigenous knowledge doesn’t fit into a colonial linear system. It’s lifelong, and occurs on a completely different timescale from the one we learn in public school.
To return to poetry, knowledge is embodied in how you move through the world, even when that knowledge is in a different language.
Manahil: Thank you so much for the conversation, Selina.