Photo credit
Jason Mills

Biography

Born in Ontario, Lauren Carter grew up on the North Shore of Lake Huron, a terrain of forest and big water which haunts her work, and now lives outside Winnipeg, Manitoba. She’s published four books – two novels and two poetry collections. Her debut, Lichen Bright, was longlisted for the ReLit Award while her first novel, Swarm, was longlisted for Canada Reads. Her second novel, This Has Nothing To Do With You won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction and came out the same year as her poetry collection, Following Sea, which recounts family ancestry and infertility, including the journey of her great-great-grandparents from mid-19th-century Niagara to Manitoulin Island. A writer of narrative and sometimes confessional poetry, she’s been influenced by Sylvia Plath, Evelyn Lau, Susan Musgrave, Micheline Maylor, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and regularly teaches online and in-person workshops. Find her at www.laurencarter.ca

Micro-interview

Did you read poetry when you were in high school? Is there a particular poem that you loved when you were a teenager?

My house was full of books. As a pre-teen, I got my hands on my mom's anthology of the British canon from her university days and fell in love with "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes. I found it so exciting! "The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas... And the highwayman came riding, riding, riding, the highwayman came riding"... etcetera.

Then, one day, when I was in grade nine or so, I was flipping through a book in my high school library and came across a poem by Susan Musgrave. I wish I could remember the title. What I do remember, though, is that the description of a heart made me think, Wait a second! You're allowed to write like that?!

After that, I started writing and reading free verse and more contemporary poetry. I found Sylvia Plath and Evelyn Lau. I read and wrote mostly in silence because I lived in a very small town in northern Ontario where nobody I knew was writing poetry. I persevered. 

When did you first start writing poetry? And then when did you start thinking of yourself as a poet?

I started writing poetry as a kid. As a teenager, I wrote avidly. My late uncle, also a writer who lived far away in Utah, taught me how to submit my work using the hefty Writer's Market. I started sending out fat envelopes with the required S.A.S.E. (obviously, this was pre-Internet days). I published my first poem in a Saskatchewan journal called Green's when I was 18 and went from there. I've always thought of myself more as a writer, though, than a poet, since I write in multiple genres and actually enjoy writing fiction more. Poetry comes for me from deep and difficult emotions so it often hurts. 

What do you think a poet’s “job” is?

To elucidate our own experience in such a way that it echoes on a universal level. To express this with such specificity and precision that it plugs into another's and gives them that little bit of a thrilling shock. To point to what cannot easily be seen and give it outlines, shading, form, dimension. 

If you had to choose one poem to memorize from our anthology, which one would it be?

Probably Lorna Crozier's Packing for the Future: Instructions. I love its vivid imagery and imagination and rhythm. 

Publications

Title
Lichen Bright
Publisher
Your Scrivener Press
Date
2005
Publication type
Book
Title
Following Sea
Publisher
Turnstone Press
Date
2019
Publication type
Book
Poem title(s)
Knitting; Blackbirds
Title
Voicing Suicide
Publisher
Ekstasis Editions
Editors
Daniel Scott
Date
2020
Publication type
Anthology
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