1. Introduce yourself; who are you and what types of books do you write?
My name is Richard Harrison. I write books of poetry and contribute to and edit books of essays. To support all that, I’m a Professor Emeritus in the Department of English, Languages, and Cultures at Calgary’s Mount Royal University. I also run poetry workshops, and act as editor and mentor, mostly to poets, but also to writers in other forms as well.
2. What are your books about?
My poetry is chiefly about family life. My editor says he’s only ever seen one other poet as focused on his parents as I am. Outside of that, though not too far outside, I’ve written a book of poems about hockey and one about my infant daughter learning to speak. I have also published poems engaged with war, the environment, and religion. My essays have been about hockey, comics and graphic novels (I taught a course in these at the university), and writing itself.
3. What was the inspiration behind writing your first book?
The inspiration for the first book was to have a first book. I had the ambition for it when I was 19. It arrived when I was 30. That was time well spent. I’ve just looked it over, and it’s what I think a lot of first books are, a map of the writer’s world: in it you can find the list of all the countries I’ll later visit, sometimes with whole books to just one of them, for the rest of my writing: family life, my father’s history as a soldier, and mine as a teacher, a nod to my undergrad studies in biology, my mother, hockey, sports, a bit about sex, religious speculations, politics, and death, and poems about art, artists, and just a little about poetry itself.
4. What did you learn while writing your second book?
That as tempting as it is, a second book can’t be an extension of the first, a relationship between past and future writing that I’ve had to learn with every book after the second one as well. That each book I write isn’t done with me when it’s published; only when it’s taught me as much as it can from being in the world should I think about the book to follow, and that “only when” for me has taken anywhere from two to four years.
5. What is the most rewarding part of being an author?
The short answer is that it’s a way of life which continues to ask me to learn something new. So wherever my poems take me, or whoever I meet, or whatever I’m led to do because of something I wrote (or do to find out what I need to know about what I’m writing), it’s always making my world bigger. Writing is work with no end date. I have one, but my work doesn’t. I’ve been very lucky to have been able to make my life around it.
6. What is the hardest part of being an author for you?
I don’t know that there’s any “hardest part” about being an author that’s different from the hardest part of being any kind of artist – or just being a person. Being an author makes me confront that – the kind of person I am vs the person I’m still working to be. Maybe that’s the answer: writing is a mirror that’s always in front of you and you’re always in the light.
7. What is your current writing project?
I’m just putting the finishing touches on my next book, My Mother Joins the Resistance. Thinking about the previous question, this book was one of the most difficult to write; to get to the poems I needed to look hard and deeply at my lifelong relationship with my mother and her story and my part in it and its effect on me, and then, in the process of understanding all that, make art on the art’s own terms.
8. What is the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
You don’t write poems to say what you want to say, you write to find what poems need to be written through you. In light of that advice, I threw away a 100-page manuscript. One of the best decisions I ever made.
9. Where can readers discover more about you and your books?
Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Harrison_(poet)
49th Shelf: https://49thshelf.com/Books/M/My-Mother-Joins-the-Resistance
The Wolsak and Wynn website: https://www.wolsakandwynn.ca/authors-all/richard-harrison
The Poetry Archive (UK) has several recordings of me reading: https://poetryarchive.org/poet/richard-harrison/