Coach House Books asks a.rawlings a few things about Wide slumber for lepidopterists

CH: What is lepidoptery? Are you a lepidopterist?

AR: Lepidoptery is the study of butterflies and moths, and a lepidopterist is someone who studies lepidoptery. I’m not a lepidopterist; I’m someone who studies lepidopterists. What would you call that: lepidopteristologist? Poet? a.raw? I’ll take the latter.

CH: Are you an insomniac?

AR: I’ve had my nights of monkey-brain and restless sleep. Dyssomnias, parasomnias, nrem and rem sleep fascinate me … What are our bodies doing when they fall asleep, are asleep, wake up? I’ve experienced a number of parasomnias, such as night terrors, bruxism (teeth grinding), som-niloquism (sleeptalking), somnambulism (sleepwalking)…. I’ve witnessed hypnic twitches, when muscles involuntarily spasm as the body falls asleep. As well, I’m an active dreamer with strong retention of my dreams, and the esoteric practice of dream interpretation intrigues me. I’ve had a number of bizarre occurrences while asleep; I’ve written poetry, music, and jokes during remsleep. I’ve dreamt that I died on three occasions (tornado, plane crash, drowning). Once, I woke myself from a dream because I was laughing out loud over a joke I’d made up (I could only remember the punchline: Camel’s Soup). I’ve roused myself from crying while asleep. I’ve even spoken aloud to get the attention of someone else in the room to get them to wake me from a nightmare. Writing poetry while I slept particularly intrigued me, how my wakeful preoccupations affect my resting brain. The phrase ‘silmaril iritidan,’ which repeats in Wide slumber for lepidopterists, was lifted directly from a poem I’d penned in a dream.

CH: What made you make the connection between moths and sleep disorders?

AR: Several coincidences converged … A first connection: the dictionary. On an early November day during my undergrad, I procrastinated writing an essay by thumbing through my dictionary. I was delighted to discover words new tome, mellifluous words that begged to be spoken aloud. I copied down these words: lepidopterist, littoral, macrocarpa, maquette, marram, parasomnia. Around this time, I was in contact with a high school friend of mine. Matt Ceolin was working on his Masters in Visual Art at University of Windsor, and we took the notion to collaborate on a text-and-art project. Matt had a fascination with insects (his final ocad project, entomechology, consisted of 200+ life-size insects handmade from metal and acetate and mounted in barn-board boxes), and I was fascinated, at the time, with sleep and dream studies. The phrase ‘wide slumber for lepidopterists’ occurred during a free-writing session and rattled around in my head for a week. The subjects intersected. What happens when a person obsessed with a subject dreams at night; does the subject matter affect how they think, how they dream, how their bodies process information? I’d been toying with this question for a while, in terms of my own tendency to write poems while dreaming. If a poet writes poems during sleep, how might a lepidopterist work while she sleeps? What effect does intimate examination of insects have on long-term information processing and subconscious behaviour? A ’pataphysical question cropped up, too … What happens when you breed the vocabularies and ideas of two disparate subjects together (in my case, lepidoptery and sleep/dream studies)? What does the spawn of incompatible bedfellows resemble? From that perverse breeding, Wide slumber for lepidopterists was born.

CH: Very important to your poetry is the way it looks on the page and the sounds that it makes. Can you tell us a bit about this?

AR: As an arts practitioner, I am obsessed with sound, text and movement. How can sound translate into text, text into movement, movement into text, etc.? How can a page act as a stage for words? In the performative arts, attention is given to set, lights, sound, stage, blocking/choreography … It’s my intention, my pursuit, my hope to consider text holistically, paying attention to a text’s aural, visual and kinetic elements; composing with the entire field of the page in mind; being aware of the structure of the poem and how the material qualities of language can enhance, can be the poem.

CH: You dedicate your book to Northern Ontario. Why?

AR: I spent my formative years in a Northern Ontario log cabin. It’s where I’m from, and Wide slumber is peppered with autobiographical references to place, event, memory. Matt Ceolin, the visual artist whose work is throughout Wide slumber, also grew up in a log cabin, and lives in the backwoods near Sylvan Valley today.The Algoma District in Northern Ontario has a dramatic landscape, with deep freshwater lakes,hills and mountains, gulleys, ravines, gulches, swamps, rivers clogged with beaver dams, caves and fields thick with snow in the winter and with sandhill cranes and fireflies in the summer. Living in an isolated area, down gravel roads frequented by logging trucks, I constantly longed to escape to the largest city possible, where I’d have easy access to people and culture. Ever since arriving in Toronto,though, my writing’s been infused with Northern Ontario. I can’t write about the city; rural spaces are my escape and my obsession.The book is also dedicated to our dads, who raised bees. Their infectious care of and attention to natural environment and its inhabitants was passed along to Matt and me.