10 Questions with Kate Rogers
Kate Rogers, author of The Meaning of Leaving (out this month from AOS Publishing)
Kate Rogers is a poet, essayist, and reviewer committed to craft and community. She recently won first place in the subTerrain magazine 2023 Lush Triumphant Contest for her suite of poems, “My Mother’s House.” Her work has recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. She has been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She’s also a Co-Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series.
Homeless City, a chapbook she co-authored with Donna Langevin, debuted this past January. On April 20th, she’ll launch The Meaning of Leaving (AOS Publishing), a precise and powerful collection that considers multiple experiences of leaving— an abusive marriage, a city where you’ve built a life, a version of yourself that no longer serves.
Kate will be one of four poets performing as part of WOMEN IN MOTION, a virtual poetry reading and open mic on March 6th, 2024 at 7 pm. Register here if you want to check it out!
1. Did reading and writing play an important role in your childhood? Were there any specific books or stories that left a mark on you as a young reader?
I read a lot as a child and began writing in grade four thanks to a kind English teacher who saw me sitting away from the other kids with my books at recess. I wrote poetry and kept a journal from age ten. Some notable books for me were The Wind in the Willows, Swallows and Amazons, Paddle-to-the-Sea, The Paper Bag Princess, Punkinhead and The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People. By the age of ten I was reading the “Anne” books by L.M. Montgomery and read them all. I read Dennis Lee’s Alligator Pie to my younger sister.
By puberty I was reading any adult books which I found on my parents’ bookshelves such as She by H. Rider Haggard; The Chrysalids and The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndam; Farenheit 451 and The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury; War of the Worlds and the Time Machine by H.G. Wells; Brave New World by Aldous Huxley; Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell and Ursula LeGuin’s World Sea series. I was drawn to fantasy, dystopian novels and science fiction for many years, in part because of the dystopia south of the border. (I was aware of the American Civil Rights movement and assassination of Martin Luther King.) My mother worked with Indigenous youth and told us about the horrific impact of residential schools on Indigenous kids and families, so we had our own dystopia in Canada, although as I recall, not many non-Indigenous people seemed to be aware of it at that time. The first moon landing happened when I was eleven years old and space exploration was a new phenomenon when I was a child. By age 16 I was reading Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing and most especially Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath had a huge impact on me as I watched my mother’s struggle for independence and the disintegration of my parents’ marriage. While recently re-reading Plath’s poem “Lady Lazurus” I noticed echoes of her ending in my poem, “The Don Jail Ghost” in The Meaning of Leaving.
2. What’s the best hour of the day for writing?
Early morning when my dream mind is still close to the surface. I like the silence. But I can also write in noisy cafes at any time of day.
3. If you were to throw a dinner party for any 10 people, living or dead, who would you invite? Where in the world would you gather? What would be on the menu?
If I threw a dinner party for 10 people I would hold the dinner party in Toronto. It is such a vital, multicultural city with great food options. I would invite Sylvia Plath; Virginia Woolf; Nellie McClung; my mother Mitzi (Marusia); Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, a Hong Kong poet friend now living in exile, and these Canadian poets: Lorna Crozier; Marsha Barber; Donna Langevin; Bänoo Zan and Louise-Bernice Halfe Skydancer—former parliamentary poet laureate of Canada, whom I was lucky to meet when she took part in a poetry event I helped to organize. We would eat Ukrainian dishes like those my mother made while I was growing up such as cabbage rolls, perogies and borscht. And Chinese dumplings including vegetarian, pork and leek and pork and spinach, Ma Po (spicy) tofu, and Chazi-bao (spicy eggplant). I am basing my menu in part on the similarities between my mother’s Ukrainian dishes and the Chinese food I came to love during the 20 years I worked in Asia.
4. Most people think of writing as a lonely pursuit, but there are so many opportunities to find community and connection within the writing world as well. You’re currently a co-director of the Art Bar reading series, which is, I believe, the longest continuously running poetry series in Canada. Can you talk a little bit about Art Bar, and the role it plays in the Toronto literary scene.
Art Bar has been around for 33 years. It is much beloved by Toronto poets and many poets from around the country hope to feature there. We have three features a night and run weekly at Toronto’s Free Times Café, except for public holiday Mondays. It is a lot of work to co-run a weekly poetry series! And being a co-director is definitely a labour of love for me. I do most of the scheduling of features, the related admin and two-thirds of the emceeing. I enjoy those interactions with poets because they give me a chance to learn about their poetry. I like supporting the poetry community and reaching out to poets from a wide range of backgrounds to feature with us. My co-director Michelle and I are on a mission to make Art Bar more representative of the diversity which is Toronto, and Canada, than ever before. By diversity I mean a wide range of perspectives on life including ethnic and racial diversity as well as gender identity and sexual orientation.
We give poets without books feature readings and we also feature famous poets, including those who have won the Governor General’s Award. It is so rewarding to welcome new poets to the open mike which follows our feature readings, especially when they admit to never reading their work in public before! We want to create a safe space for the poets and the audience, especially during these deeply troubling times.
A lot of the work I do for Art Bar draws on my almost 30 years of post-secondary teaching experience. That includes timing both feature and open mike poets! Teaching came from my heart and so does poetry—I believe everyone deserves to have a voice and to be heard. A lot of poets say that they choose poetry as their medium because it comes directly from the heart.
5. I keep coming back to the poem “The Giraffe-bone Knife Set,” which opens with you pricking your finger on a bone-handled knife at the back of a kitchen drawer. You go on to relate the gruesome memory of your abusive ex-husband harvesting vertebrae from a dead giraffe and having them made into the knives as a gift for you. This is followed by the memory of first meeting your husband, and a pair of episodes depicting emotional and physical abuse. The final stanza of this powerful poem reads:
Sucking my bleeding finger
I decide again to keep the blade,
to remember. I slide it
to the back of the drawer.
Having left these often fraught and painful places and relationships behind, what compels you to hold onto your memories of them, and to return to them so vividly in your writing? How do you find the emotional resilience to do so?
I think putting painful memories away in a drawer we never open again does not deal with them. I think that poetry often involves a search for meaning. Perhaps it is the teacher in me that wants to keep learning from all my life experiences—bad and good. I believe wisdom grows out of the courage to be vulnerable to ourselves, to refuse to give in to judgement—from ourselves and others. Confidence grows from taking such risks and confronting pain. I realize that some people might not choose this path to healing and understanding. However, I believe that the physical and psychological damage inflicted by abuse is less likely to limit and define us if it is examined. Socrates is famous for saying that the unexamined life is not worth living. One of the things I came to understand from writing the poems in The Meaning of Leaving is the connection between intimate partner abuse and emotional abuse in my family of origin.
Poetry is an important part of the examined life. It conjures emotion and experience through imagery, metaphor and other literary devices and finds meaning in pivotal moments and experiences. I hope my poetry resonates with others who have not found a way to express their experiences with abuse. Perhaps it will help them recognize an unacknowledged part of themselves and maybe even to heal.
And to be completely open, I could not have written the poems about intimate partner violence immediately after leaving my ex-husband Derrick, or for many years after that. I was busy building my career and finding my way in a new culture. I was in therapy for more than five years after leaving Derrick. Much of that time was focused on helping me understand what had happened to me: being gaslit, losing my self-confidence and my sense of self.
I might not have written the poems in The Meaning of Leaving about enduring an abusive marriage if my ex-husband Derrick had not died during the pandemic. When his brother contacted me to tell me about Derrick’s death many painful memories were stirred up. I felt a startling sense of freedom when he died, even though I had re-married and was living on the other side of the world. I was compelled to write the poems about the abuse I had endured. It also helped that I had left Derrick in 2005. Therapy and the passing of many years, plus meeting the love of my life—my current husband—helped me heal enough to open the drawer to the past and to create art from my struggles. I am still peeling the layers off the onion of my psyche to understand what happened to me and its connections to my relationship with my father. I am unsure whether I would have been ready for the relationship with my wonderful current husband if I had not revisited the trauma of my last marriage. And doing so was not a rational decision—it was an intuitive one. Finally, I find the resilience to continue peeling back the layers of the onion of myself because I am loved and still often experience joy and wonder, especially in the natural world.
6. Your collection is about experiences of leaving, but many of the pieces are about arriving. Sometimes this takes the form of arriving in a new place and having to make sense of it and of the person you become in that place. Other times, it’s about returning to the place you have come from and finding that you aren’t the same person you were when you left. I’m wondering how leaving Canada to build a life in Asia impacted you as a writer. And what was it like return to Canada 20 years later?
Yes. My collection is about leaving and arriving and transformation. Living in another culture broadened my perspective tremendously and made me question my assumptions. I wrote a lot of poetry about trying to understand Cantonese culture and belong to Hong Kong society. My poem from The Meaning of Leaving, “On my way to Cantonese class,” expresses my yearning to transcend cultural boundaries.
I learned a lot about the impact of colonialism while working in Hong Kong. For example, access to learning English in Hong Kong at any level has long been associated with status even though Hong Kong stopped being a British colony in 1997. Fluency in English has meant better opportunities. Limited access has impacted students’ confidence and self-respect. I noticed that with my own young adult students and tried to help them develop agency in English through creative writing and studying Chinese writers who wrote in English, or had been translated.
I am still grateful to have had the chance to work in mainland China and Hong Kong. My time in Hong Kong, especially after leaving my ex-husband, was very transformative. I became active in the poetry community there through teaching creative writing and being a member of the Poetry OutLoud reading series collective. I co-edited Not A Muse, a women’s poetry anthology while based there. We attracted contributors from around the world. The anthology sold very well in many English-speaking countries for years.
I went to Asia first and foremost to get a good and well-paid job during a time when Toronto college and university sessional instructors had poor pay, insufficient hours, no sick pay and no guarantee of employment from semester to semester. In the 1990’s, as now, college teaching in particular was done mostly by women. I wonder whether a profession dominated by men would face the same kind of inequalities?
When I was offered the chance by Toronto’s Centennial College to teach in mainland China and earn a good, reliable salary I leapt at the opportunity. I wanted to change my life and get away from unhealthy family relationships and a pattern of choosing partners who weren’t good for me. Unfortunately, when I met my ex-husband I missed the red flags about him. I explore why in the poems in the first section of my book.
Returning to Canada was and continues to be a very mixed experience. I am grateful to live here because of our social programs and beautiful natural environment. I am very grateful that my current husband and I moved to Canada together just before the pandemic because of vaccinations and all the support offered to individuals and small businesses during the pandemic. And after an absence of twenty years my home country has changed as much as I have. Sadly, post-secondary sessional instructors still struggle with the same issues as they did before I left. As I also express in my poems in The Meaning of Leaving, the homelessness crisis disturbs and saddens me. So many unhoused people are struggling with addiction and mental health issues—problems only made worse by homelessness. It is also shocking that some Indigenous communities still don’t have clean drinking water 25 years after I left to teach in Asia. I have felt compelled to write about many things which have shocked and disturbed me both while living in Hong Kong and after returning to Canada and I probably always will.
7. What does your writing space look like?
My writing space is the study I dreamed about having for years. It is small, but I have a large desk with a built-in book case and two floor-to-ceiling book cases on the opposite wall. There is also one under the window. I have a very comfortable red recliner in which I can read (and draft poems longhand in my notebook, which is normal practice for me). I have my MA diploma in English and Creative Writing on one wall, along with the poster for the Banff School of Fine Arts in 1990 which features me with others in my cohort and our instructor, the Banff writing school director Adele Wiseman, looking jaunty in a fedora. I also have the cover art for my 2017 poetry collection Out of Place on the wall and posters from 2019 Hong Kong teachers’ marches in support of democracy. On my bookshelves, in addition to books, I have many souvenirs such as an origami kami spirit folded from paper by one of my Hong Kong creative writing students and a board eraser decorated with umbrellas and the slogan “Democracy now!”
8. How do you know when a poem is finished?
I know it is finished when I have revised it several times in most cases, and pinpointed and honed what I want to say and how I want to express it. In the best cases the poem tells me where it wants to go. I think some poems need to be tweaked even though many years have passed since they were written or even published. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats revised his early and mid-career poetry as he got older. Between the Lines: W.B. Yeats’s Poetry in the Making, a wonderful book by Jon Stallworthy, shows Yeats’s revision process in detail with many references to Yeats’s manuscripts. The famous Canadian poet and former Toronto poet laureate Al Moritz recently shared with me that he believes writing poetry is 80 percent revision. I agree! I am grateful to Al for blurbing my collection The Meaning of Leaving and recently inviting me to give a workshop on duende and poetry of witness in his poetry class at the University of Toronto.
9. One of the forms of violence your collection considers is ongoing assault on the natural world by human beings. Reflecting on your sister’s wish “for the plague / to take our species / out” you conclude “I cannot argue / with her furious sadness.” And yet, your final poem ends on a note of hope, an evocative celebration of a yellow warbler which concludes with the exclamation “You live!”
What does it mean to have what poet John Portelli has termed “reasonable hope” in 2024? How can we find hope amid experiences of violence, injustice, and climate devastation that can sometimes feel overwhelming?
Since I left Canada in 1998, Climate Change is noticeably worse with wildfires and the extremes of heat domes, drought and heavy rain all of which are having a terrible impact on birds and other wildlife, not to mention people across the country. I believe it is truly a Climate Crisis now. I won’t lie—I felt despair during the 2023 summer of wildfires across Canada. As an imaginative and empathic person it was difficult not to imagine the suffering of wild birds and animals in the fires. Reports from climate scientists I have read state that only adult birds and animals had a chance to escape the largest wildfires. The government policy of continuing to grow the petro-chemical industry in Alberta in particular is very disturbing. The number of people in denial about the Climate Crisis concerns me deeply.
And yet, I believe that by engaging with nature in whatever ways we can we encourage others to do so too. During the pandemic thousands of people world-wide became bird watchers. Their example got the attention of many others: even as the pandemic ebbs more people continue to become birders. In The Meaning of Leaving my poem “On Seeing Wild Trumpeter Swans Again” celebrates the wonder I experienced while watching trumpeter swans. In the past twenty years while I was working overseas trumpeter swans have returned from the brink due to conservation efforts in both Canada and the U.S. and many wild breeding pairs without conservation tags are being encountered all over Ontario and the northern U.S.
We can work together to protect the natural environment. Look at our success in opposing development of the Greenbelt in southern Ontario! I attended protests against developing the Greenbelt which were held in Cobourg, the little town where I live one hour east of Toronto. We may have to fight that battle again, but we forced the provincial government to back down, change its plans, return land to the Greenbelt. Our successes certainly give us reasons to be hopeful! And writing itself is a hopeful act—a way of reaching out and communicating our experience instead of giving in to despair.
10. Who should we all be reading (or watching, or listening to) right now?
Watch: Power and Politics—civilized debate and discourse on social issues and government policy with host David Cochrane on CBC’s News Channel. This television news program offers analysis and airs a variety of perspectives on issues and conflicts through often lively panel discussions and interviews. Available through CBC Gem.
Listen: Ideas on CBC Radio which explores contemporary thought and the most burning social issues of our times. One recent episode featured Toronto poet and organizer Bänoo Zan. She read her poetry and spoke with host Nahla Ayed about Iran’s Woman, Life, Freedom Movement. Bänoo Zan describes herself as a War Correspondent in Verse. Ideas is available weekly and free through the CBC Listen App and on CBC Radio across the country.
On a related note, Bänoo Zan is currently seeking submissions for the Guernica Editions Woman, Life, Freedom Anthology based on the struggle for women's rights in Iran. The anthology is open to submissions from anyone, anywhere in the world, as long as the submission is about women's fight for equal rights in Iran. The deadline is: March 15th 2024. One to three poems can be submitted via Submittable. More information can be found here .
Read: Moon of the Turning Leaves and Moon of the Crusted Snow, recent novels by Waubgeshig Rice. His two dystopian novels set in northeastern Ontario offer well described settings, characters, and riveting plot twists. These stories offer a perspective on life in Indigenous communities which is important.
Read: Kim Fahner’s poetry collection Emptying the Ocean which takes the reader on a journey through myth and women’s struggles to live an artistic life. Beautifully written.
