Through writing, I hope to always have a path back to a home that I can no longer physically return to. Through poetry, I hope to make a home in a different shape, in another form.

Etel Adnan says, “Writing forces one to go the bitter end of what thinks.*” Her statement strikes a chord with me—the demanding mental and emotional striving towards a meaningful and artistic poem, finding its core and form in a morass of cloudy ideas and feelings.

For me, poetry is an opportunity to fully engage with a singular aspect of writing in a way that isn’t possible with other genres.

As a poet, scholar, and fiction writer, I write most often about hauntings— by this I mean the imprint that is left behind by an experience, a person, or a place. I am constantly excited by moments when genres intersect or cross over to create something new.

so I sometimes think the poem is an animal showing proper simple complicated being and imagine if you could help it begin to come-to-be then that’d be astounding but mostly over here in this place I just fail at such stewardship

Now I apply myself to the task of a borrowed language, becoming mine, yet never mine. For whom is English an exclusive right, birthright, language entrenching a colony of values? To write, to make room with words, is to de-colonize, to lead the woman-child out of the labyrinth where she had been lost for lack of tongues.

For me, the thrill of writing poetry is this possibility of being inspired, of looking at something or someone as if for the first time, seeing it or them without imposing myself. Jan Zwicky in her book, Wisdom and Metaphor, calls this seeing-as.

When I’m not seeing the world poetically (lines arriving, images that stick, connections that surprise, a kind of spatial awareness that is outside of ourselves) then I feel flat—imbalanced. Not whole. Half alive. I don’t want the literal. I crave the figurative, always.

Aspects of my poetic work include deepening knowledge of self and home, decolonization, prairie history, environmental collapse, and the long poem.

Julie Joosten’s first book, Light Light, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and the Goldie Award. Her second book, Nought, was published in 2020.

Poetry has allowed me to explore loss, the world of the unseen and the Ancestors. It offers me the ability to gesture towards memories that are incomplete, opening doorways to the thoughts and feelings that live on as dreamscapes in our psyche, inhabiting our bodies and souls.

Through the honesty of her words, she embraces the spirit world, the resilience of her foremothers, the integral healing powers of disassociation as a survival mechanism, and the richness of her PoWaMeWin - dreams, which reconnects her to herself.

I think of my poetry as a form of rescue work. I’ve spent much of my creative life giving voice to figures from the recent or distant past, silenced by turmoil and time, who clamour to have their stories told. It’s a process that been called the ventriloquism of history…

My poetry cannot exist without the confines of colonialism still bearing down on me that has kicked my ancestors so hard in the past that future children fell. My poetry punches people in the guts.