Leesa Dean (she/her) is the author of a short story collection, a novella in verse, and two poetry chapbooks. Her first book,
Waiting for the Cyclone, was nominated for the 2017 Trillium and Relit Awards, and she was runner-up for the 2023 Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. Her most recent poetry collection,
Interstitial, will be out Fall 2025 with
Caitlin Press. She lives in the Slocan Valley (unceded Sinixt Territory) and teaches creative writing at Selkirk College.
Her poem “Sleeping with Bats” appears in the forty-third issue of
Touch the Donkey.
Q: Tell me about the poem “Sleeping with Bats.”
A: The poem “Sleeping with Bats” was inspired by an actual event I experienced in my twenties. I was living in Montreal in a small apartment and somehow while making dinner, a bat flew in. He kept doing laps around the living room. I tried to shoo him towards the wide open doors, front and back, but he just wouldn’t leave for almost 24 hours. He didn’t actually read Beaudelaire but I could really imagine him there, hanging upside down from the bookshelf, immersed in such poetry. I was also in a bad relationship at the time—it took years to clearly see the parallels between the bat and I, but there we were, kindred spirits, fully aware of the exit but trapped in the thrill of being in danger.
Q: How does this piece compare to some of the other work you’ve been doing lately?
A: This poem is part of a larger collection that will be published by Caitlin Press in 2025. The title is
Interstitial and it explores a vast cross-section of themes like women in complicated relationships with themselves, with substances, with their ancestry. Many of the poems are autobiographical. For example, my grandparents were both language minorities (Francophone from Saskatchewan, Hungarian refugee) who traded their languages for their vision of the Canadian Dream at a time where assimilation was the common practice. I write about my mother who was a polio survivor and lived in a body cast for 9 months after being an initial test subject for a process that was brand new at the time. A Herrington Rod was fused with her spine so that she would not end up in a wheelchair. She never told us any of that, didn’t want us to perceive her as a victim, was unable to imagine the beautiful power of empathy. The overarching framework for the book was actually published by you, rob, in 2023-- it was a chapbook called
apogee/perigee which consisted of 24 visual poems, all exploring the themes mentioned above.
Q: Do you have any structural models for the kinds of work you’ve been attempting? How easy was it for you to assemble such a wide array of lyric modes into a single, cohesive manuscript?
A: This is an interesting question about structural models. I actually had to create my own structural model for this project--well, I got someone else to do it. I had a specific structure in my head for the 24 visual poems that create the foundation of
Interstitial. I drew it out on paper first but it looked more like complex mathematics. Luckily I know a great graphic designer/comic artist, Nathan Vyklicky. He looked at my rough sketch and my list of very specific requirements, like “each poem must be located exactly where the corresponding zodiac house would be located on the provided source chart from the 16th century” and “the apogee poems must be located diametrically opposite from the title of the poem, to mirror a state of apogee.” I couldn’t tell at first if my ideas were even legible to him or anyone, but he went away for a few days and came back with exactly what I wanted. I really value that kind of collaboration and deep listening.
A number of other poems in the collection are prose poems. I am a great fan of prose poetry, Does this come from my background as a fiction writer? Possibly, but I also think there is something incredibly immersive about not having line breaks but still operating in the realm of images, in lyrical language that bends and yaws. I like the look of a dense block of language and think of all the words inside the invisible text boxes as building kinetic energy, as vibrating atoms. I was in part inspired by Ben Lerner’s collection, Angle of Yaw. Our poetic styles could not be more different, but from him I learned a type of journey to the last line where truths are confirmed or completely subverted.
I’m not sure how easy it was to assemble a wide array of modes into a cohesion, but it was enjoyable and also necessary. I think what creates the cohesion, though, is the context: I wrote the book almost exclusively within the two year period between when my father was diagnosed as being terminally ill and when he died, about 12 days after I handed in the final manuscript to my publisher. Talk about Interstitial. Not all of the poems are about him—just a small fraction—but the context spurred this greater question of how we are positioned at any given moment in time. I remember so many different versions of my father. I remember so many different versions of myself. In this manuscript, I allowed those versions to coexist; I allowed the dichotomies to inform and complicate each other.
Q: With two published books, two chapbooks and your current work-in-progress, how do you feel your work has developed? What do you see yourself working towards?
A: To answer this question honestly, I feel like I’m growing up in tandem with my work. I’ve always felt the relationship between myself and my work to be quite porous, a type of Venn diagram where the narrative style or poetic craft and the actual me occupy a large common space. This is especially true of my forthcoming book, but it inherently had to be as I was writing predominantly about the death of both my parents rather than exploring a persona, as I did in my second book,
The Filling Station, which was written entirely from the point of view of a Brazilian woman, a fictional character who narrated the life of Manuelzinho, an actual person who appeared in a 1952 poem of the same name by Elizabeth Bishop.
Interstitial is very different. If I think about the way I wrote about emotional topics when I first started writing poetry in my late twenties, I think there would have been a lot of anger and that anger would have translated into a narrower kind of poetics. The poems in
Interstitial move beyond the immediate emotional plain, the anger and reckoning, to much deeper, philosophical explorations.
Now that I’ve completed
Interstitial, I am moving through a second draft of a novel called
Tunnel of Stars. I can’t even articulate how excited I am about it. It’s a slightly gothic coming of age story that takes place in my home region, the West Kootenay, but also in Vancouver, New Orleans, Montreal and Morocco. I’m still at the stage where it’s difficult to articulate exactly what the novel is about, but I have surprised myself by writing a romantic narrative with a happy ending. I have traditionally been disinterested in the happy ending, especially in the context of heteronormative relationships, but this narrative is also interrupted by unwanted pregnancies, suicide attempts, entire families dying in car accidents and other significant barriers. I'm interested in writing through an ugly kind of beauty, a kind of beauty that becomes accentuated by life’s legit and ever-present challenges.
Q: I get the sense that you see your work—whether poetry, fiction or visual work—as extended elements of a single, ongoing trajectory. How does a thought or an idea or a sentence announce itself into the shape of a poem or a work of fiction? Do ideas of genre emerge first, or is it something else, something other?
A: I’ve been thinking about how to respond to this question and I keep coming back to Ursula Le Guin. I remember reading her essay titled “The carrier bag theory of fiction” while doing my MFA at the University of Guelph over a decade ago now. The visual of the bag really stuck with me and I suppose I consider my writing in a similar fashion. I’m out there gathering ideas, sentences, images, recurring themes, and they all go in the bag. I imagine this bag to be elastic, able to stretch form, to hold multitudes. I’m not always sure if something will be a poem, an essay or a story when it first emerges, when it goes into the bag or comes out of the bag to be refined. I write and publish in three genres so any of those forms could be feasible for any idea, and sometimes the boundary of the genre isn’t entirely clear in my writing. I’m thinking now of Joshua Whitehead’s essay titled “Writing as a Rupture” (published in
Making Love with the Land) where he refers to genre as “boundary and border,” which is something I’ve been thinking about more lately.
I’m currently writing a novel that is mostly fiction, part prose poem, slightly autofiction at points. I have a feeling my work will continue to delineate rather than lineate as I... what? Age? I’m not sure age is the right word here. Continue to expound? I am leaning into hybridity these days and feel validated by the growing number of genre-defying works being published at the moment.
Q: Finally, who do you read to reenergize your own work? What particular works can’t you help but return to?
A: I’m the kind of person who will pull like 10 books off the shelf and fan them out around me when I need poetic inspiration so I have more of a rotating favourites list. I also have a special area on my bookshelf where I put certain books on display, like talismans, as if the power of those poets might radiate into my writing space and bless me with even just the essence of their poetics. Currently
Night Sky with Exit Wounds is staring at me—Ocean Vuong is a damned genius, can’t say it enough. I’ve got Ada Limon’s
Bright Dead Things out right now, too. When I want to shake myself out of my language patterns I often go to Canisia Lubrin and Liz Howard’s work. How many poets do I name? I could just fill a page right now.
But the one book that is always on my shelf facing forward, the one that never moves, is
Common Magic by Bronwen Wallace. I love that book with all my heart. I actually have three copies because it’s out of print and hard to get and I keep giving copies away. I actually got a “Common Magic” tattoo in February—a montage of images that embody this idea for me (steam rising from tea, moon phases, wildflowers, the magic of the perennial, the lifeblood of cosmic clockwork) and Simon Gentry from Chateau Tattoo in Salmo turned into a beautiful half sleeve. That’s something I started doing, getting a tattoo every time I publish a book. I’m already thinking of what to do for the next one that comes out in Fall 2025...
