An interview with Joel Robert Ferguson

Joel Robert Ferguson is the author of The Lost Cafeteria (2020, Signature Editions) and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from Concordia University in Montreal. His poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Arc, The Columbia Review, The Honest Ulsterman, The Malahat Review, Orbis, and Southword Journal. He lives in Winnipeg, Treaty 1 territory, with his partner and their three cats.

How did you begin writing, and what keeps you going?

I had a few false starts with writing. My mother is a published poet and a former English teacher, and though I didn’t take an active, consistent interest in poetry until I was well into my 20s, there was still a groundwork there from growing up in a home where literature was valued.

I started to get “serious” about poetry after reading poets from the Kootenay School of Writing (or influenced by the KSW) like Donato Mancini, Colin Smith, Jeff Derksen and Rachel Zolf, writers whose work is politically committed without being didactic and whose use of language is shot through with this immense sense of play. Though my poetry is usually more of a personal-lyric these days, reading experimental writers like these felt very liberating and instilled in me the sense that I was “allowed” to write poetry. I think that’s what keeps me going with my writing practice, feeling allowed to have a relationship with literature as something much, much larger than and beyond myself. It’s a relation that’s given me a lot and I hope to maintain for the rest of my life.

What poets have influenced the ways in which you write?

Beyond the aforementioned poets there are quite a few. I learned a lot from the writings of Roberto Bolano and Sina Queyras (who I had the good fortune to have as my thesis advisor), specifically how effective it can be to interlink metatextual references with personal narratives in poetry. Seamus Heaney has been another big influence on me, as well as Frank O’Hara and his evil twin Frederick Seidel.

Have you noticed a difference in the ways in which you approach the individual poem, now that you’ve published a full-length collection?

I find that now it’s a bit more of a struggle not to overthink any individual poem I’m working on; it’s easy to start thinking of each new poem as needing to be contributing towards some new manuscript, which can really stifle spontaneity in structure, language, motifs and the like. I often have to remind myself to just let poetry be what it wants to be, that the joy of exploring thought and feeling through language is a good of its own, not necessarily underwritten by the goal of publication.

How important has mentorship been to your work? Is there anyone who specifically assisted your development as a writer?

Mentorship has been really important for me, both in helping me improve my craft, pointing me in the direction of collections and poets I should be reading, and teaching me how to edit (and edit, and edit, etc.). In particular, I was most fortunate to have a year in undergrad at the University of Winnipeg where I was taking creative writing courses with Catherine Hunter and Margaret Sweatman; I think that their classes were invaluable for me as a young writer, as Catherine really pushed me to work on my lyric voice, while Margaret encouraged me to try more and more experimental forms.

Can you name a poet you think should be recieving more attention?

So far as living poets go, I think that my fellow Winnipegger Jason Stefanik is doing some incredible work; his 2018 collection Night Became Years is well worth checking out. I’d also mention Ian Kinney, whose debut book Air Salt I’m reading right now and which I’m enjoying a lot, as it threads the needle between found text and personal narrative in a very cool and exciting way.