Author spotlight: Clare Goulet

Dea Toivonen, Program Officer (Arts Education): How did you arrive at lichen as your subject? Do you have any seminal memories involving lichen that began this fascination?

Clare Goulet: Yes! One deep memory: Growing up, my backyard was woods. One summer, at 3 or 4, I climbed alone to the top of what seemed a granite mountain thick with crumbly brown bits—Umbilicaria [rock tripe] it turns out—something to peel as I lay on my stomach and sang to myself. I remember the heat and how the lichen-covered surface scratched my bare skin. I don’t remember a world without lichen.

I rediscovered them more consciously in Labrador—they’re the first growth after snowmelt and make treeless rock seem lush, teeming, rainforest. I came back from walks with full pockets, arranged them on a pine board, and resisted learning names to prolong that first encounter of seeing something as it is. Once names kick in you don’t see the same way—plus the danger of thinking you know or own, moving on once the label is pasted over. So I cultivated ignorance and just sat with them awhile. 

Resistance broke in 2003 when Lichens of North America came out, big as a 19th century family bible, gorgeous and sacred. It was all there: fungus and algae, symbiosis and historic uses, Latin and common names—goblin lights, shield, here come the metaphors—with chemistry and keys to species. Philosopher-poet Jan Zwicky put out Wisdom and Metaphor that same year, so the two books cooked together in a pot on the back of the stove while I kept collecting lichen for joy and teaching poetry for work. Simmer, simmer. 

Until the inevitable: in St. John’s in 2006, I gave a passionate paper on metaphor with a parallel thread on lichen—both composites of different elements that in relation make something new. Even their histories are analogous! Both dismissed for millennia, just starting to be understood. A fresh comparison of two or more things isn’t a figure of speech; it’s a figure of thought that changes your mind. And lichen isn’t a plant, it’s a hangout (fungus, algae, yeasts), a relationship you can hold in your hand. I mean, how cool is that?

I wanted metaphorical structures—poems—to explore that analogy. I sketched a lichen A-Z field guide on a notebook page then shelved it for umpteen years to raise my amazing kid. It felt good to get back to it. A joy. It felt like singing on that rock in the woods again.

After the manuscript went to press, I treated myself to the just-out English translation of Vincent Zonca’s Lichens and discovered that American poet Brenda Hillman made a similar analogy. Don McKay too, mapping that analogy via essay with genius verve in his All New Animal Acts. We’d each arrived to it in our own way and time, and I love that we crossed paths. 

It seems that the process of integrating research into your work is quite intensive. Do you enjoy extensive research? What was your research process like?

It felt like simple curiosity. Once I opened up the Pandora’s box of what-are-these-critters, hyphal tentacles spread in every direction, and I followed—down literal paths in the woods around the pond, into libraries, herbaria, science journals, conversations with botanists, mediaeval drawings, fairy tales. Every book on lichen I’ve seen—centuries of them, even the most disciplined and scientific—seems pulled to cover everything: history, dyes, perfume and taxonomy, illustration and medicine, as well as types and species. This book’s alphabet structure, its index of names, thankfully gave it a tight container. Within that, it does spill everywhere. And when I thought it was done, I still ended up in an Oxford herbarium handling Linnaeaus’s specimens, then in 1810 Irish botanical letters of Ellen Hutchins, and now there’s a new section… a kind of herbarium visit for the reader. I blame lichen: its system is to integrate everything and spread.

In researching for this collection, what was the most shocking or exciting discovery that you made?

Three shocks. The first was symbiosis. When I first started collecting, I didn’t know about symbiosis: fungus plus photobiont in partnership, roomies. Swoon. The second was the thrill of being alive for Toby Spribille’s 2016 finding of not two but three partners—or more!—with the presence of yeasts. The third was slapstick. I was standing on a dock at Elbow Lake, Ontario, zooming in with my phone-camera on lush cup lichens at eye level on a shed roof. I was at maximum enlargement when a monstrous multi-eyed, fanged spider filled the whole screen. I screamed and fell off the dock. 

Much of your career has been as a teacher, running a writing center, and as an editor. How do these experiences inform your writing? Do you find that your editorial experience refines your writing voice? Challenges it?

For sure the three feel symbiotic. Even the editing is an extension of teaching and mentoring, which I love. Does my editorial experience ‘refine my writing voice’? God no. If only. As a poetry editor, going all the way back to Helen Humphreys’s Anthem with Brick, I’m a slow, careful perfectionist-type, tilting to minimalist. As a writer of this book, I turned out to be loose, chatty, exuberant, disobedient. That was a shock. Perhaps in the practical circumstance of working solo parent, I had to deke my inner editor simply to get this book made. At live readings, she still comes out, that editor, horrified and tweaking and tightening, or changing up the order: and that’s ok, because the book is out.

Something that struck me—that I think this collection does exceptionally—is operate on multiple temporal scales. It conjures deep geological time, it engages with human history through mythology and historic figures from many eras, and it often occupies a contemporary landscape, populated with late 20th and 21st century cultural references. There were parts of the collection that felt primordial and elemental, some that felt particularly “pop” and of this moment, and many that felt both at the same time. How were you thinking about temporality and situating the lyrical voice in time?

If you look at lichen long enough, you start thinking like lichen, which means reaching in all directions and integrating as you go. I looked at a lichen, and it pointed everywhere. And maybe—in the same way a first novel is often autobiographical, bringing in everything in that writer’s life to date—this first book of poems ended up bringing in a lifetime of reading. In some ways, it’s a book responding to books, to myth and stories and language and translation. I didn’t intend that. 

Deep time, I have to laugh: I was text editor for geologists Rob Fensome and Graham Williams for their Last Billion Years—twice, both editions—so geologic time is now a reflex. They taught me how to swing from the long view to the close shot and how to see both in any moment. It’s relaxing to know we’re just specks and dust. 

Your language and rhythm, as well as surprising citational choices— from Looney Tunes, to ‘walk into a bar’ jokes, to ancient Greek philosophers, to Vogue magazine (and much more)—bring a great sense of humour to your poetry. I was interested in tone as I was reading, finding the tone ranging from trickster-esque or even flirtatious to the gravity of seriously reckoning with human finitude. Can you speak to your intended tone (or tones) and how those choices relate to the overall ambition of the collection?

I let the lichen, or my response to a particular lichen, situate the voice and tone—and these species are wildly diverse! Allowing that was tough; I prefer books and albums that are extreme in consistency, even monotone. But you can’t respond to tiny, hidden elf-ear the way you can to a bodacious red Cladonia. Each elicits certain thoughts, memories, rhythms, line lengths. 

This drove Andrew at Gaspereau a bit nuts, as it presented a problem for page design, as poems varied from short lines to long, spare to storied. In the end, he hung each poem, as he explains it, “on a vertical centre line strung between the title and the folio to allow inner and outer margins to expand and contract as needed.” His design creates a physically coherent book, which was key, and his selection of Matthew Carter’s Galliard for typeface keeps it spacious. I am so grateful to Andrew for this wizardry, and it was fascinating to watch how the connection of tone and style unfolds through a built physical structure. And to see how early that takes shape—I’ll never write in anything but a 5×7 notebook again. 

Your collection largely treats lichen as a metaphor for metaphor, and for either/or and both/and forms of knowing. What do you think we can learn from these ways of knowing, and what do you believe the power and possibility of breaking out of binary thought forms is? Essentially, what do you think this does? How does it change us?

You’ve cut to the heart of what I care about. I mean, if the quantum physics of the 1920s is to be believed (though we still live day to day as if it isn’t, like a weird flat-earth society), then simultaneous opposing states or multiple states co-existing is just how it is. So why wouldn’t we make things that enact or point to that, or create and organize ourselves in ways that align with the rest of the universe? This kind of thinking is emerging more in younger generations: adaptable, flexible, persistent, fluid, social, collaborative, more open to thought that includes but moves beyond analysis. Jan Zwicky’s Lyric Philosophy, Iain McGilchrist’s Master and his Emissary, Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, Robyn Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: perhaps these books and the current lichen renaissance strike a chord because other forms of knowing have failed us or turned out to be not what the world is, not how even our own 3-pound brains work. Metaphor and lichen offer another way of being—though whether we adapt, like lichen, soon enough to escape consequences is unlikely.

Can you speak more to how you see language’s relationship to the world and the way that your work is taking up an interest in both language’s possibilities and its limitations?

Language fails us. And yet!—

Are you working on any new projects? Do you have a sense of what you are inspired to next pursue?

A novel at last ready to go out, after a necessary hiatus, and a new work started, Loan Words—minimalist pieces made of words that English borrowed (not always nicely) from other cultures, telling those stories with the words taken. When we open our mouths, we speak with voices of other times and places—language tangles, and everything connects.