Nancy Huggett reads from her collection as she accepts her 2024 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award at a ceremony in October 2024.
“To find the form that accommodates the mess, that’s the task of the artist.”
Beaming through a Zoom call, sitting many cities away, Nancy Huggett speaks to me from her home office. She is at the start of her yearlong PEN mentorship after winning the 2024 RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award. She is a poet, a writer of creative non-fiction, and dreams of a collection of personal essays too. As she quotes Beckett, Nancy shares with me how she forms her writing to suit her life story.
Her poetry collection, Revelation – for which she won the award – achieved just this. It’s a tender group of poems tackling caregiving and loss, something Nancy knows intimately: her adult daughter, Jessie, suffered a life-altering stroke ten years ago.
Nancy has expertly fit writing into the rhythm of her life, whether it’s with the clipboard under her arm at home or the online writing sessions she’s made routine. And after winning the New Voices Award, and receiving mentorship from Susan Olding, Nancy has completed her first poetry manuscript.
Now at the end of her mentorship, PEN revisits our earlier conversation with the poet. Nancy talked to us about community care, poets she loves, and how she’s re-wilding herself.
PEN Canada: It struck me that so much of your work, as well as your life story, is about resilience.
Nancy Huggett: It’s interesting you say that, because I’ve got a creative nonfiction piece coming out in Passages North called “Almanac of Sorrows” that braids our family’s story with the Persephone and Demeter story and wildness. In many ways, it shows a pathway to resilience.
I guess that is very much what my writing is. My first writings after Jess’s stroke explored how community held us. I’m a strong advocate for community, not self- care. Community care is such an important part of resilience.
During the pandemic, you found community online and picked up writing again.
It was small and accessible to me, whereas so many other things had not been accessible.
The writing was like a little fire. I started out with a half-hour coffee writing session with Firefly Creative Writing. I think they were free, or you could do it by donation. It was a reintroduction to poetry. There were no stakes.
In my writing, I don’t plan. I don’t say, “I’m going to write this.” I would never get it done if I did it that way, because our life is so fractured in so many ways.
As a matter of fact, I was not writing about our family’s experience at all. At the beginning, writing was a way for me to not have to live our experience. It was just being playful with words, being very present in the moment and just showing up.
One of your passions is rewilding your writing. What does that mean?
Well, two things:
One is looking at the importance of place to story. I live by the Rideau River. We live on the park there. And the ocean has always been an incredibly important part of my life. And so, for me, I look at the congruencies and how much place impacts what I write about. And being away in a wild place – doing walks in the woods – allowed me to understand death and absence.
But also, rewilding in terms of getting a little bit wild for me. In our family I’m the dream killer. I’m a practical person. So, in this other piece, “Almanac of Sorrows”, I really fell into the Greek mythology. I played with the pigs and with Hades and with Jessie’s dreamworld where Frankie Valli came and rescued her in a boat and they went down the River Styx. That was kind of a wildness, using my imagination way more than I typically do.
Talk to me about your references. Like classic mythology: Orion and Medusa show up in the collection of poems with which you won the 2024 New Voices Award, and the story you are writing based on Persephone and Demeter.
Because I am a North American settler of European descent, the Greek mythology and the biblical stuff underlie my writing.
In part, I think we’re always looking for stories to hang our own stories on. And these are mythic stories that people can relate to: it gives people a frame for holding a challenging story. The reader trusts that you’re not going to drop them.
When I’m writing about Jessie’s stroke and our recovery as a family, I want people to understand the depth of the loss, but not be overwhelmed by it. And Greek myths or fairy tales, many of these stories and tropes are in many different cultures – they’re a framework we’re all familiar with. We understand where the story might be going.
I think especially when you’re dealing with traumatic work – and I consider the story that I’m writing now a story of trauma and of resilience – if I want the reader to go there with me, I need to promise at the beginning that I will keep them safe, that I won’t traumatize them or re-traumatize them if they’ve had a similar experience.
What is the manuscript you’re working on?
The poems I submitted for the New Voices Award are from a manuscript that started in a writing class. There, somebody said “Oh, I think you have a chapbook here.”
That someone is Joan Kwon Glass. I fell in love with her poetry. When I have a little bit of money, I find poets who I really like and I’ll support them by taking a class from them. I’d taken a few classes from her. I found I generated the weirdest, best stuff with her.
She helped me work on the chapbook. Then, as I submitted stuff, she said “I think you’ve got a whole collection here.” And those are the poems that I sent for the New Voices Award. This is my first book, so I have a lot to learn. And then trying to find a publisher for it, that’s a whole other new learning experience.
Tell me about the intrusion poems you wrote.
There’s only one of them. It’s after Julie Berry, who did a similar poem. So, I emailed her. We talked about the form and decided what to call it. I just thought it was such a beautiful form to capture what it is to be a caregiver.
I am intrigued by forms like that. I’ve been playing with erasure and insertion poems. I’ve been playing a lot with absence right now. I took Jessie’s MRIs and blew them up and took all the parts where her stroke was and was trying to figure out, how can I write into this absence?
Speaking to your process, you’ve mentioned that you keep clipboards around the house.
I just have one clipboard. During the pandemic, there was this online group called the Poetry of Resilience, and it was hosted by James Crews and Danusha Laméris. It was 1.), what I could afford, and 2.) what fit my schedule. And it was Danusha who said she walked around with a clipboard.
I thought: that’s how I can work. When Jessie’s in the shower, I’ll just have the clipboard. That’s also why I wrote poetry: because it was short, it was portable. I could edit a poem in the time that I had, as opposed to working on a longer piece of creative nonfiction. I mean, the number of poems I’ve started on my phone, I don’t think I’ve ever started any creative nonfiction on my phone. But my notes app is filled with little ideas.
You’ve mentioned so many poets you admire, and the New Voices Award has a mentorship attached to it –
That was the most exciting thing about it. It’s funny because when it came up while talking with PEN, I had just been at a poetry reading online for some student of Ellen Bass. She had talked about all the people who had mentored her since her MFA.
I don’t have an MFA. I don’t have any of that. And I realized other people have mentors.
That’s one of the weird things about being older is that I don’t really have a mentor. I never had a mentor experience. And I wouldn’t even know where to start because I’m not connected within my physical community where I live because I only came to writing after the pandemic. Nothing was in person.
I couldn’t do anything in person anyways: in the evenings is when many crises happen with Jessie. She gets anxious at night, she feels nauseous at night. If she starts to vomit, we have to go to the ER because it puts her at risk for a stroke. And my husband doesn’t drive. So, every time I would do something at night in-person I would get a phone call and I’d have to just stop doing things.
So, now I’m trying to figure out how to get more connected to the local community. Community has always been really, really important to me.
Since when?
Definitely since Jessie’s birth. Jessie has Down syndrome and we were so committed to inclusion at a time when it was not the norm. So everywhere we went, she was usually the first child to be included. When she went to preschool, she was the first child with a disability to be included. And our vision for her was that she would grow up as a part of the community, not separate from the community.
I felt that it was important if we’re going to create diverse communities that kids have to grow up together and figure things out. And sometimes things don’t work when you do it. I certainly learned with Jessie over the years that your intended outcome rarely happens.
But you’ll always be surprised by an outcome you never could have imagined. At one point when we were in the hospital – Jessie is in her mid-30s now – she knew four of the people there. She knew a nurse. She knew a doctor. She knew somebody else because they’d all done something with her. Either they’d gone to school with her, or they’d gone to leadership camp with her. Not only do they know her, they’re comfortable with people with intellectual disabilities because they’ve gone to school with Jessie – what a great world that is!
Talk to me about caregiving in Ontario.
I think caregiving anywhere is the same: the pressures are very much the same. There are so many caregivers, both for children and for partners, that I run into who are doing an incredible amount of unpaid caregiving hours a week.
I think in Canada one quarter of the population is a caregiver to a family member or friend. So, it’s a couple of million – an incredible amount of people who are giving 5.7 billion unpaid hours of yearly.
As a caregiver, I haven’t read a lot written by caregivers. It can be so isolating. It’s very hard not to have your life shrink as a caregiver. All of a sudden you lose friends because you can’t do certain things. You can’t be the same kind of friend for many people that you used to be. And when I read something that reflects this, it is such a relief.
Danusha Laméris has written poems about the caregiving experience; her son had a disability and died when he was quite young. When I read some of her poems about being in the waiting room, I thought oh my God, people need to have access to writing like that, that reflects their reality, that gives attention to their reality. Poetry is so much about giving attention–whether it is to a tree or a person or a word. It is also giving attention to the people who are your readers, so that people will feel attended to. I think writing attends to certain needs in people for connection.
Because sometimes we don’t have the words ourselves. But to find somebody else who has the words, who can describe what you’re experiencing, I think you don’t feel as alone.
