D.S. Martin was interviewed by Burl Horniachek on March 16, 2026 by video conference. The transcript was then edited and expanded by both of them.

Burl Horniachek for Traces Journal: Welcome to Traces, Don. Could you introduce yourself a little bit and tell us about your new book?

D.S. Martin: Thanks, Burl. My name is Don Martin; I go by D.S. Martin in my writing. My newest book is called The Role of the Moon and it is published by Paraclete Press. One of the primary focuses of this new book is the metaphysical poets, particularly John Donne. I have 19 poems in this book which are in conversation with each of Donne’s 19 Holy Sonnets. I also have poems in the book relating to George Herbert, Thomas Traherne, William Shakespeare and then I also go into the 19th century with Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. These are some of the influences on the book.

This is my fifth full-length poetry collection. I’ve been involved with several other things as a poet through the years, including my long-running blog Kingdom Poets, where I post every week about a Christian poet, and have done so since February of 2010. I am privileged to be the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, where I’ve edited more than fifty collections by some of the best poets of faith out there. I also hold the role of Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College.

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Traces: When did you first encounter poetry? And, more specifically, some of these poets you engage with in your new collection?

D.S.M: Well, when I first encountered poetry it was through simple children’s poems, for example, “They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace —/ Christopher Robin went down with Alice” from When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne, which I was reading to my grandson this weekend.

I would put the greatest influences for me, growing up, into two categories: one was singer-songwriters. I was very much into music and very much into paying attention to the lyrics, and, as time went on, I found that even some of the best songwriters had clunkers now and then, because, of course, there are many different aspects to what makes a good song, or makes a song that draws you in, and songwriters know that. So, it’s not always merely poetry. Sometimes I would hear a song by a very good songwriter and really groan. I believe that’s what drew me towards looking into books of poetry.

Another thing that influenced me a lot was being raised in an Evangelical church under the sound of the King James Version of the Bible. The music of the King James particularly spoke to me. I would also say that the whole attitude about how valuable words are also touched me, because in evangelical sermons, especially expository sermons, sometimes one very small word is of great importance. So, the importance of individual words, that each word matters, came to me from that heritage too.

Traces: You mentioned music and song lyrics and some of the poems in your books are responses to various musicians or pieces of music. Are you a musician yourself? Do you play any instruments?

D.S.M: I would never call myself a musician although I’m very musical; my youngest son has inherited that, and he’s quite a musician. When I was growing up I was not very disciplined, partly because I believe I had, or even have, ADHD, and, therefore, to stay focused and to be disciplined in something like learning an instrument was not something natural to me. When I was about 14, I taught myself harmonica, and I can play quite well by ear, but that’s hardly something that compares with some of the fine musicians out there.

Traces: I ask because there are a couple of your poems, “On a Summer’s Day” and “Piano Lesson,” about how the musician has to learn by practice and discipline, and then he can kind of let go. Is that from observing others doing musicianship, perhaps your son, or other people?

D.S.M: Yes, that’s personal and observed. I can’t really place a finger on that precisely, but I would agree with what you’ve said.

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Traces: A number of your poems are also in response to works of art or movies. But you have also written poems about specific musicians. There’s a poem to George Harrison and one to Hank Williams. Why did you pick those particular musicians?

D.S.M: I suppose in some ways they could be fairly random, in that they’re significant musicians, no doubt, but I probably could have chosen dozens of others in the same context. The one for Hank Williams is in my collection Angelicus, where I have one of the angels looking at Williams’ life and what he went through. I find that as I’m listening to music, as I’m thinking about music, and as I’m learning about different people, sometimes their stories touch me. I think the Hank Williams poem is a good example. It’s the story of the character and the character moves me because of the music that has moved me.

The George Harrison poem, though, is not really focused on Harrison’s life. Like the others in Conspiracy of Light, it was influenced by C.S. Lewis. Of course, Lewis was not somebody who would have appreciated contemporary music. He died in 1963, so that was before rock and roll had really developed an artistic side. Part of it is how that particular poem speaks about Wordsworth and van Gogh, but then I bring in something I don’t think Lewis would have appreciated specifically, but still fits what his concepts talk about:

Some people though would trip over such a form

wouldn’t catch anything from an electric guitar

like Jack Lewis whose tastes were of times long gone

Because Lewis very much was a man of the past, he was very much a 19th century man living in the 20th century. So, some of the things that I love would not have been appreciated by Lewis, and yet I still appreciate him very much.

Traces: The reference to 1963 kind of reminds me of Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilus” and how Lewis didn’t live to see the full flowering of 1960s culture and how we can only imagine what his response would have been. Now, when you were putting together Conspiracy of Light did you start off with the idea of writing a whole book of poems responding to C.S Lewis?

D.S.M: I really didn’t at first. When I was younger, in my teens and early 20s, I had read everything by Lewis I could get my hands on; I was just fascinated by him. Then, I moved on to other things and I hadn’t read him for a long time. I then just decided to pull Mere Christianity off my shelf and read it, and what struck me was how many of the thoughts inside me, that I had thought were my own, were really Lewis’s ideas that I had internalized.

He was so good at writing analogies: things from the unseen world, things of the spirit, which we can’t talk about from human experience; he would come up with analogies that were perfect. So, some of what I did in Conspiracy of Light was take one of his analogies and then run with it, expand it out into a whole picture or a whole landscape. I just fell into that and it was very exciting to do so, because Lewis is so profound, and so are many of the things that he said and did. It had not originally been a plan. It just happened and I couldn’t resist.

Traces: C.S. Lewis’s own poetry is not usually considered among his best work. You’ve said to me before that he often tries to incorporate too much argument into his poetry. But, in Conspiracy of Light, you include a trio of poems (“Proof,” “Thirst,” and “Apologetics”) which, while they don’t really have a full blown argument to them, do kind of gesture towards an argument. Can you say something about how you managed to do that, without turning them into essays.

D.S.M: Well, I really do believe that poetry is not the place for arguments. For a poet to try to win an argument in a poem basically undermines the poem itself. I believe that what a poem should do is present ideas and leave them for the reader to think through. So, yes, I like that term you used, gesture. I gesture towards his arguments, because he often said really profound things. My poem “Thirst” arose from a section in The Great Divorce:

“‘There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you found them. Become that child again: even now.’

‘Ah, but when I became a man I put away childish things.’

‘You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth…”

I took that line “Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth” and I created lines that seemed like they might be following an argument, but in fact they don’t. They circle all around and paint pictures, and I think that works, because then people can think for themselves, and decide “Well, what might this mean? What’s going on here?” That’s what I seek to do.

Traces: Another aspect of Lewis’ work is his literary criticism, and he was, in particular, an important figure in what might be called the mythological school of criticism, along with some other, somewhat different critics, including Northrop Frye here in Canada. One of your other poems in Conspiracy of Light is “Truth in Myth,” where you go through a bunch of different mythological analogies or types of Christ found in earlier non-Christian stories. Tell me about how you came to write that poem.

D.S.M: With Conspiracy of Light, I wanted to try to get at every aspect of who Lewis was. I’ve encountered Christians who don’t want to hear anything about mythology, because it’s pagan, but, in fact, Lewis saw that there was truth in the myths. There’s a letter Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves that’s in the Alan Jacobs’ Lewis biography The Narnian. It goes like this:

“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I …was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving God (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me anywhere except in the Gospels… Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing himself through ‘real things.’”

The idea of these myths coming true in Christ was very much something that influenced Lewis to come to faith. I wanted to get at and play with that in my poem “Truth in Myth.”

Traces: I’ve noticed that images of lakes often recur in many of your poems. There is one from your first collection just called “The Lake,” but I also think of “A Summer’s Day” and “Moon Landing” in your second collection. Could you tell me more about the role that direct contact with nature has had in your poetry, or just your life in general?

D.S.M: It’s an interesting question to try to think about, because the place we are living, the things in our environment aren’t just the things we see, and are things we often take for granted. I remember, growing up, so often in the summers going to different lakes. My parents had a trailer, and we had a cottage for a brief time, and those times and experiences are very rich. I also grew up in the west end of Toronto, which was still an area of unmanicured fields and semi-wild places, and I would often go for walks down by Etobicoke Creek, which wasn’t far away, just to be in nature. So, even though I was living in the suburbs, I could get to nature very quickly and find water and trees. Later, I loved to go hiking with friends along the Bruce Trail. My wife and I love hiking, and now we live very close to the Thames River, just outside London, Ontario. Those things become images in my toolkit for poetry, so they come up often. Those are places I love to be and things I love to experience.

Traces: You mentioned before that you grew up in an Evangelical church and that the Bible was an important part of your early literary experience. Many of your poems are responses to various Biblical stories. How does one particular story in the Bible grab you and make you want to write a poem about it?

D.S.M: Good question. I think it usually is a case where I come to the story and I’m not quite sure what I’m thinking. It raises questions as much as anything. So, I’m trying to find my way through the story, whether it has to do with understanding the character, or why God would do something in particular.

I don’t tend to write poems about the known, so much as what I’d like to know, or what I’d like to figure out, as opposed to what I’ve already figured out. I find poetry writing is a great process for getting at truth, because when you write a poem you’re forced to be honest. If you’re just writing something devotionally, you might let yourself off with the way you’re supposed to feel, or what you’re supposed to think. But, when it comes to a poem, you’re forced into a deeper sense of honesty, which makes you go deeper into a topic.

Traces: Occasionally, you’ve written poems in response to films. You have a poem where you talk about how C.S. Lewis wasn’t really favorable to most film adaptations, but you also have one in Angelicus about Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. How is it different to write a poem in response to a film as opposed to another text?

D.S.M: Well, in the Angelicus poems, I’m writing from the point of view of angels, and in that poem an angel watches It’s a Wonderful Life. I’m having fun with it. That is, I’m asking how an angel might perceive this movie, because, of course, it’s not very accurate in its portrayal of an angel. Actually, a number of times within that collection I have my angels getting rather perturbed with the way we humans portray angels. So, I’m being playful.

Traces: Again, did you start out with the idea of writing a book of poems from the perspective of angels or about angels?

D.S.M: I began simply by writing one poem. I was thinking how I would like to write poems from a perspective other than my own. The first one I wrote in that series is called “An Angel’s View of Automobiles.” It’s basically taking our ordinary experiences and seeing what it might be like through the eyes of an angel. One thing poets do is we take the familiar and make it strange, so that we can see things in a new way. And that poem attempts this in a playful way. So, I continued from there with a few others, and then more and more ideas delightfully came to me, until I realized an entire collection was going to come out of it.

Traces: One of my favorite poems of yours is from Angelicus, “An Angel from Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body.” Obviously the poem is inspired by the specific painting, but what else went into composing that poem?

D.S.M: This was a delightful experience. I was actually in Orvieto, Italy teaching a course in ekphrastic poetry — which is poetry written in response to visual art. In the San Brisio chapel in the Duomo of Orvieto is this amazing painting, “Resurrection of the Body” by Luca Signorelli. I got to stand beneath it for a long time and just pay great attention to it, and then to write this poem, and then to come back and go over it, looking back at the painting itself. It’s a very large painting on the wall in that chapel, so it enabled me to really feel Signorelli’s capturing and interpretation of the scene. Now, obviously my poem is inspired by the painting, but a poem is never primarily a picture…

Traces: Yes, there is a striking use of particular words in this poem. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “disdiseased” used before. Just the use of that one particular word elevates the whole poem. There’s also the image here of the resurrected as they pull themselves up like swimmers pulling themselves up onto a summer dock. Again, in that one image you’re moving from a painting to the actual resurrection to a lakeside here in Canada, and I found that swift movement, all at once and in one phrase, quite wonderful. Do you have anything more to say about that particular image?

D.S.M: Simply that this one character from the painting who was pushing himself up and out of the ground looked exactly like when you’re putting all your weight on your hands pushing yourself up, trying to get out of the water. It was a gift really, in that picture, because it fit the summer dock image perfectly.

Traces: There are a lot of other resonances too. Death is often depicted as water, so coming up out of death is a lot like coming out of water. Even though the character is coming out of the ground in the painting, it’s almost like the ground itself has been liquefied. Maybe you didn’t even think of some of these things when you were writing, but it seems to me a lot is coming together there.

D.S.M: Yes, it just all came together. It was just right. As I was constructing it, it just seemed to ring true, both to what was in the painting, but also to my own experience, and what I’ve seen and heard and done.

Traces: I wanted to talk a bit about the new book. In your previous books there have been a few poems about birds. In particular, there were a couple poems with eagles, and eagles, of course, like sparrows, are birds with Biblical resonances. But in the new book you also have falcons and ospreys and others. What was the reason for so many bird poems? Do you have any particular affinity for birds? Or was it just Biblical imagery? Or something you picked up on from Gerard Manley Hopkins?

D.S.M: Well, many interrelated things. I do have a bird feeder behind our house and I do value chances to share in the birds and experience them. But there are also other things. For example, the osprey makes me think of a place where we would often go in the summer, where there were osprey nests by the Trent Canal. I saw a pileated woodpecker yesterday when my wife and I were out for a walk. They’re very large woodpeckers. But also, since we moved to the London area last May, I’ve seen bald eagles three different times. Those things are appealing to me. From doing lots of hiking, from being out on the water, from having a backyard bird feeder, those things come together to allow bird images to play in my mind. Birds are fascinating creatures, able to do what we cannot; there are so many of them, we take them for granted, and then suddenly they’re there and we are filled with wonder.

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Traces: I was particularly struck by your poem about the Peregrine Falcon in your latest book. The fierceness of the bird there reminded me of a couple of things. Perhaps the most obvious is the fierceness of some of the birds in Gerard Manley Hopkins, but I also hear the very fierce God of John Donne’s “Batter My Heart.” Could you talk a little bit about Donne and Hopkins, where you first encountered them and what their influence has been on you?

D.S.M: Certainly. When I went to the University of Waterloo as an undergrad, I was really impressed by how certain poets — obviously Christian, obviously passionate about God — were being discussed in a secular university. It struck me how powerful some of these poems are. John Donne particularly hit me. I could talk about John Milton or a number of other poets, but the Holy Sonnets impacted me particularly at that time. Then, through the years I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to meditate on the Holy Sonnets and some of Donne’s other writing. These poems speak of the poet wrestling with God and wrestling with himself and with his own inadequacies and trying to understand what he doesn’t yet understand; and that is, as I’ve already mentioned, something that appeals to me. Writing a poem is to try to discover what I know by looking at the world — and John Donne did that extremely well.

In this particular poem I’m taking the image of the peregrine falcon who shouldn’t be able to do what it does. At the speed that they travel their eyes should dry out, their lungs should rip open, but that doesn’t happen. Why? Because God’s designed them. Now, I don’t just go into that in the poem, but I turn it around and view God as the bird of prey, and my response is not to get away like the pigeon, but to be ready to be consumed, shall we say, by the predator, because that is where true meaning comes: from being in submission to our God.

Traces: Another Canadian poet who was strongly influenced by both Donne and Hopkins was Margaret Avison. Could you tell us a bit about her and some of the other Canadian poets, religious or not, that have influenced you.

D.S.M: I’d say some of my earliest influences were Canadians poets −although not necessarily those who wore their faith on their sleeve. I think of Alden Nolan, who I believe was Catholic. I never did research into him; I just loved the way his poetry worked. Someone like Leonard Cohen, who, although not a Christian, was certainly a man who wrestled with issues of God and faith. Margaret Avison came up pretty early for me as a significant poet. She is described by anybody who talks about her as a difficult poet, that is she’s someone who you really have to spend time with, although I did find through the years that her poems were gradually becoming more accessible. But she would write in such a way that left you with many things to think about, many things to wrestle with, and that made the experience of reading her poetry very worthwhile.

Some other Canadian poets I appreciate, particularly poets of faith include Sarah Klassen, in Winnipeg. I find her poetry to be very inspiring. In fact, I think some of her more recent poetry, as she’s getting older, is actually even better than the excellent poetry she wrote when she was younger. So, certainly a poet to look into and to spend some time with. Another is John Terpsta.

Traces: Not all your poems are about works of art or experiences with nature. There are also some about your family. We’ve already talked about how your musician son has appeared in your poems, but you’ve also written about your parents and their struggles with dementia. There’s one in the new book called “Glorified” and one from Ampersand called “Peace and Quiet.” That is quite a difficult personal subject, but I find them quite moving and wonderful as poems. How do you deal with extremely personal material like that and manage to make poems that other people can appreciate?

D.S.M: Well, one thing is that poetry needs to be specific and immediate. You can’t talk in generalities. We find the universal in particular stories, like the fact that my wife and I spent a lot of time and care looking after my ailing parents. Even though they weren’t staying in our home, we were very much involved in visiting them regularly and looking after their needs. We just found that experience to be consuming. I’m not saying necessarily in a negative way, but just that it was all pervasive and was on our minds a lot. We sought to honour my parents through that difficult time and to be there for them. I mean, to love someone is not to say everything about them is wonderful, but to be honest and true and love them through whatever they’re going through. It was difficult, but things that you live through are bound to come through in whatever art you are producing.

Traces: Thanks for that. Now, I did want to finish things off with a look at something that’s a little bit more mundane. Living in modern Canadian society, you know we’re not necessarily surrounded by extremely poetic or inspiring sights all around us everyday. You have some poems about being in grocery stores and parking lots and things of that nature, and you’ve managed to make a bit of humour out of those sorts of things in your poems. There’s a humorous side to your poetry elsewhere, but some of those really mundane things seem to especially bring it out, like in your grocery cart poems. Could you say a little bit about those poems and about writing humorous poems in general?

D.S.M: Yeah, it’s kind of a funny thing, because when I was younger and writing poems, I didn’t write anything that was humorous at first, even though I was somebody who liked to joke around and, you know, maybe tease my parents or tease my friends or play with puns or things like that. And then, I’m not sure when the change came, but it was quite early in my poetry writing where I realized that every aspect of who we are can shine through in the poetry. And of course, the broader your poetry is, the more things there are for people to identify with. “The Heart of a Grocery Cart is a Wayward Thing” is basically about how you see these grocery carts down in ditches and in creek beds, and I was imagining the grocery cart as being a living thing and playing with that. I could touch on serious things and yet make it playful and funny. Because everyone has seen grocery carts bent and broken and down in the ditch, I think everybody can relate to it, and that’s part of what makes it funny, and also what makes it hit home a little more too.

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Burl Horniachek is a Canadian teacher, poet and translator, and the editor of To Heaven’s Rim, a major anthology of world Christian poetry. He was born in Saskatoon and grew up south of Edmonton. He studied Ancient Near Eastern Studies (Hebrew/Ancient Israel) at the University of Toronto and creative writing at the University of Alberta with Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott. He currently lives near Winnipeg, with his wife, a surgeon, and their two kids.

Scott Aasman was interviewed by Liv Ross via Google Meets…

Liv Ross for Traces: To get a sense of place, and how you were formed as an artist, can you tell me about your initial drives and inspirations to become an illustrator, and who were your primary influences starting out?

Scott Aasman: Like many kids, I was always drawing, from a really young age. But when I was about five, I had something called Legg-Perthes disease—essentially a degenerative hip disease, which causes the deterioration of the femoral head of the hip. And it forced me to be in bed, in traction, for six weeks with casts on my legs. Eventually, I wore Forrest Gump-style braces on my legs with a steel bar between my knees from when I was five to about eight. During that time, being a young kid who went to school, it was a little bit difficult to go outside during the winter—getting snow stuff on and all that. So I spent a lot of time inside during those years. During that time, I did a lot of drawing and it became a thing I was able to use to differentiate myself. I was known as the kid with braces, and so to be able to be known as something that was not just a kid who was in braces, but as a kid who could draw allowed me to take a little more control of how I can present myself to the world rather than this needy kid who’s kind of limited. I could be the kid who could surpass limitations and draw pictures of whatever he wanted. From Grade 1, Grade 2, into Grade 3, I was doing a lot of drawing because that was the way I could really express myself and kind of give myself a better face. I have this distinct memory of drawing Snoopy from the Peanuts comics, and my teacher praising me for it. We were doing art clubs at school and she let me be a part of the older group for drawing because I was at that level. So that made me feel really special, and I just never really stopped drawing from there on.

As I got older, I got into skateboarding culture and snowboarding culture and was influenced by the art on skateboard decks. I spent a lot of time looking through old skateboarding magazines and drawing skateboarders, and that helped me a lot with figure drawing. That was a scene that really embraced artistic abilities. Art was kind of a cool thing for that.

As I got older and friends got into bands, I did not have a lick of musical talent, but I had the ability to draw. So I was drawing t-shirts, poster designs, and album covers. That was a way that allowed me to have an in with that whole band culture. I always found myself in these art and art-adjacent communities, being able to express myself in that and make myself a part of them.

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I never set out to be an illustrator, I guess, but it just worked out that that was where my skills fit in, and I like the democratic nature of illustration. It’s less to do with the institution, less to do with these higher-up galleries or things where you are playing a game. I mean, that’s not to say there aren’t any games to play while you’re building a career in illustration. But I like being able to make work that rubs shoulders with people’s every day. Be it in a magazine you’re leafing through, or on a t-shirt design, or album cover, or skateboard graphic—I find it really cool that somebody drew it. That’s what inspired me as a kid and still inspires me today.

If we want to talk about primary influences, I mentioned Charles Schulz and Peanuts. But also Bill Watterson with Calvin & Hobbes. Bill Keene with Family Circus. I spent a lot of time as a kid just copying comics.

Calvin and Hobbes was a real breakthrough for me. I distinctly remember drawing Calvin and realizing that his hair wasn’t just lines. They were little triangles. So, learning about line weight by copying the work that Bill Watterson was doing. Those kinds of artists really allowed me to understand how to make drawings and were influential on my work, my love of drawing, and how I draw.

Traces: I really like that you brought up the comics. Some of the things I love about your work, whether you’re doing the full comic pages or strips, or your single image illustrations, is that they are great examples of storytelling in a visual medium. One could think that to tell a story, you have to use words, whether written or oral. But you are able to get across a full story, even in a single image. So, how was it that you were able to move into being able to do that? How do you come up with some of these stories? How do you determine the details to get that story across?

Aasman: Yeah, I’ve always been super fascinated with stories, even from a young age. I have memories of my children’s Story Book Bible as a kid. They had these kind of baroque images of the Bible stories. They had this one of Moses raising the brass serpent in the desert. I don’t remember how that story was told, but I do remember how the images portrayed the terror on the people’s faces, and the snakes biting people, and Moses determined as he raised the image of the snake. I was so fascinated by that image, how it could just communicate so much of this entire story in this one image. So I’ve always been interested in how pictures can also tell stories.

I think my study of Art history aided all this. In university, I got really into the Northern Renaissance artists and was really inspired in how they treated Biblical stories in the sacred art of the time. Guys like Jan van Eyck, and Rogier Van der Weyden, Robert Campin, and how their stories aren’t just a single moment in time. There’s kind of like different time periods all included in one image. And it’s not just a snapshot like how we see a picture. It’s more like layering different elements of the story into one, on top of that they are often depicting these stories not in history but in the present day, with Biblical characters wearing common clothes of the time, in places that reflected where the artists came from.

Also sketchbooking. I’ve always kept an active sketchbook, and it’s always a big mess of just stuff kind of thrown together. That’s a way to learn how to fit images together, how the images can interact. I’m interested in how things sit with other things on the page. You can have two different forms, and they can inform each other. Through those various roots, I came to my own style, my own approach. I don’t take one snapshot from the story. I take several snapshots across the story and layer them together, kind of interweaving and intermingling, allowing the story to unfold and different elements to rub shoulders against each other. Hopefully, by hitting some of the familiar notes, people can recognize the story, and then also see how having these various different aspects that don’t make logical sense can meld together. They can then put the pieces together themselves, make connections.

Traces: You brought up allowing the viewer or participant to have connections to put together the pieces themselves, to read the image. Much like critical reading of prose and poetry, I feel like critical viewing is also a learned skill. If you’re willing, I would love to go over a couple of your pieces and have you open out some of the images that you are using and create a sort of jumping off point for people coming in to explore your work. Giving them a bit of a sense of direction. I would like to start out with one of your recent illustrations, and one of my favorites, Knight and Dragon.

Scott Aasman: Yeah, this one is called Blood of Dragons//Language of Birds. It’s loosely based off of the story of Sigurd and the Dragon from Norse mythology. There’s an old, old story that goes, that if you drink the blood of a dragon, you can understand the language of birds. That was the starting point of the entire image. It’s a Norse story, but it’s obviously not Norse imagery. I’ve got a European knight there. It’s very loosely tied.

If we want to rewind a little bit here, the way I approach these images, I’m dealing with different versions of narrative. The meta-narratives that go beyond culture, that form who we are as people groups. Whether they are religious stories, myths, or cultural stories, I like to infuse some personal narrative into these as well. Also local narrative, so my community, my city, or my country. There’s always a layering of narrative in these as well, so hopefully people can relate them on different levels.

So this dragon one. I was really interested in the story of Sigurd, and the birds that helped him defeat this dragon. I also thought it was really interesting, this idea of drinking blood. It’s a part of our sacraments as a Christian.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dragons the past couple of years. They’ve been really interesting to me. In a lot of cultures, they are not purely evil. They can be helpful and beautiful. Even in the Bible, as I just mentioned, Moses is told to raise a bronze snake that the Israelites were to look to for salvation from disease. The term “seraph” in Hebrew can be translated as “fiery serpents”—so is it too much a stretch to think of God’s angels being dragonlike?

Maybe I don’t want to go too deep into this, but I did have a sort of weird spiritual encounter with Jesus where he kind of revealed himself in the shape of a dragon. It was a weird experience, but it also provided a sort of impetus for this image. There’s this idea of someone wrestling with a dragon, which also points back to Jacob wrestling with God.

Traces: I did pick up on the design for the dragon being drawn from the Asian Lung Dragon, rather than the more European Wyrms. And the Asian dragon motif tends to be associated with blessing and benevolence. It’s easy to make a connection here with St. George and the Dragon, but the pose and framing mimics more the images of Jacob wrestling the angel.

Scott Aasman: That was a very conscious effort. Taking the Asian style dragon, sort of long and twisty—one that was held up, rather than pinned down. I think a lot of it is exploring my relationship to European myth and a North American.

Both sets of my grandparents immigrated from the Netherlands. So I do have a bit of a tie to Europe in my blood, but I’m trying to figure out what it means to be a North American and understanding these stories. How can I bring in more stories of this land? I know Martin Shaw has talked about knowing the stories of the places you’re from. And you and I were at Breath and Clay, and I was talking to Malcolm [Guite] about it as well. He gave me some insight to, that there’s such a rich tradition of storytelling here in North America as well, and Jesus shows up in those places, too. So how do I tie into those?

I’m losing this particular piece in it, but this is tying into the broader or bigger issues I’m running into with telling stories in my art. Deciding what stories to tell. I guess with this one, it’s a Nordic story that I’ve put a more western European spin on, with elements of what I learned from Asian cultures and their views of dragons, plus my personal story of experiencing Jesus as a dragon are all colliding in this thing. What happens when we drink Jesus’s blood? What happens then? We speak the language of birds. We engage with nature differently. We engage with the world differently.

Traces: I would like to move into the St. Christopher image. As we were selecting illustrations to discuss, you mentioned this one was a little bit more of a struggle or a wrestling to bring it into being. It took you a number of years.

Scott Aasman: This image is another one that is really important to me. It’s from a series called “Lullubies, Legends, and Lies.” where I made a conscious effort to put a number of stories from the Bible, to Christian and classical myth in a narrative blender both as an image but as a story and see what happens. This story, this image I made, I started almost ten years ago. I drew out a good portion of the upper half in pen and ink. My son, who I modeled into Jesus in this image, drew on it with a marker. I was kind of defeated and let it sit for a number of years, before I pulled it out, digitized it, and kept working.

It deals with the story of St. Christopher. In a lot of Orthodox icons, he’s depicted with a dog’s head. This sort of ugly, terrifying creature from the fringes. His entire life, he was seeking the most powerful one to serve. He goes to a warlord, who cowered at the feet of a king, who cowered at the feet of Satan, who cowered at the symbol of the Cross, but he couldn’t find Christ. So he gave up on following anybody. He began a life of just helping ferry people across a river. Eventually, a child came to him who needed help crossing the river. As he carried this child, he realized how heavy the child was getting and almost drowned. When he reached the other side and dropped the child off, the boy revealed himself as Christ. He said “While you were carrying me, I was carrying the entire world.” From there, he follows Christ until he is martyred, getting shot by arrows. Although several of the arrows that were shot missed him. There’s a lot of cool mythology around that.

This story comes from the Golden Legend, a book of popularized lives of the saints. And that’s what this piece was based on.

I used my son carrying his favorite truck as Christ , and I had a whole bunch of local freshwater fish swimming around him. Fish from the area where I’m from. I was kind of tying in his early life, the dangers around him. Him crying out, looking for someone to serve amidst the tumult. Christ revealing himself.

It’s working in several layers. It has the river scene itself, elements of his death, elements of his search, and the tension between all of that that he must have felt.

Traces: Out of curiosity, you have these arrows which are in a kind of scribbly pattern. Is that a reference to the original destroyed image with marker scribbles?

Scott Aasman: You know it could be, although it was unconsciously done. It would kind of fit with the story and the making of the image. That’s all where the scribbles were, too. That’s a good observation.

This one is an older image. I feel like I’ve changed a lot as an artist since doing this one. But it was one of the first real deep dives to see how far I can push this storytelling in an individual image.

Traces: Another one that you had sent was the Aspidochelone.

Scott Aasman: This one is based on a couple of different stories about navigation, and my grandparents’ journeys to North America from Europe. It’s about St. Brendan the voyager. The land of milk and honey. The Promised Land.

In 2019, my last surviving grandparent passed away. We’re going on seven years ago that this happened, but I’d been thinking a lot about legacy and the journey that my grandparents took, this act of faith after World War II when their country was demolished. They were young. They got married and moved across the ocean to a place where they could only take one suitcase and not a lot of money. At the same time I was reading about St. Brendan and his journey. In it, there’s the aspidochelone. It’s depicted like a colossal whale or turtle, and it resembles an island. It’s often luring sailors to their death.

There’s this interesting story of St. Brendan, and he sees this island in the middle of the Atlantic. They celebrate Easter on it. It ends up being a whale, named Jasconius. He celebrates Easter on the back of the whale, who complains about their fire causing pain and kicks them off, and they continue on. I was thinking of St. Brendan sailing to a new land, but also North America being Turtle Island, and the land of milk and honey for my grandparents—but also how are we perhaps ‘making a fire’ where it does harm to the place we are—and how can we better honour the place we find ourselves.

The little ship on there is the ship that my grandparents immigrated on, as well as a set of my wife’s grandparents. Two years ago, we visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, where they have the actual port where the ship landed and my grandparents entered Canada. The gates that they walked through. At that time, I was thinking a lot about what it means to enter the desert or wasteland in order to come to a new place. What it means for that place to have its own identity and being, and how do we adopt the place, and yet let it be its own place with its own people and stories and character and personality. How do I navigate my European roots with my Canadian identity now? It’s a collision of different stories and cultures coming together.

Traces: I want to go ahead and move into your work with comics, as I know that this has been a new move and taking up a lot of your time recently.

Scott Aasman: As My kids started reading, they gravitated towards comics and graphic novels, and I started reading with them. I was blown away by the stories and art that was present in many of them. It wasn’t very acceptable literature when I was their age, but it’s a legitimate artform! As an adult coming back to Charles Shultz and Bill Watterson now, there’s some deeply profound and beautiful stuff in there! But there is also just a lot of good storytelling.

But my introduction to comics started with a zine that our friend Corey [Frey] and I have been working on for a couple of years called nephew. We’ll talk about a weird idea. I’ll draw a bunch of pictures, and Corey will write a bunch of words that turn into a poem, and we’ll sort of smash them together to see what happens. The marrying of image and word is at the heart of illustration and at the heart of comics.

I’ve always sort of had my images layered on top of each other but this caused me to stretch things out a bit and make space for words. Eventually, I just took the plunge and created boxes to go to a more traditional comic look

I have a series that I’m working on called Men Like Trees Walking. I’m almost done with all of the drawing, and then I’ll do a bit of digital editing. It’s trying to stretch how far images can go in storytelling and how the brain fills the space between two loosely tied images. It’s not a very straightforward way of comic book making, although I have been exploring more traditional comic book making with the Dolorous Stroke which is going to be published later this spring, as well as another one based on The Wasteland from T.S. Eliot.

I’m interested in how the brain connects different panels when there are no words. But I also wanted to create something a little more approachable.

I’ve shown a lot in group shows and galleries. That’s exciting to me still, but it felt like trying to cater to an intellectual crowd. Maybe like you’re trying to play games or reach a certain level of credentials. I like comics because there is an un-pretentiousness to it. There’s a really cool community for it in my city, of people who just make stuff. There’s something very low stakes and democratic, but also the potential to say something very deep. I really like how it can just be xeroxed and stapled together and handed out. It doesn’t have to prove anything. It just is what it is, a thing that can exist.

Traces: Seeing some of the posts and comics that you have shared, they have a very Folk Art kind of feel to them.

Scott Aasman: I think you can see thats an overall trend I’ve been working at in my all work. In my older work, like the St. Christopher, I was very purposeful and tight about where I placed my lines and how I formed my work, and I’ve been trying to loosen that up. For the longest time I was pushing for accuracy and perfection, but with the digital tools so prevalent and accessible nowadays, I’ve grown a bit tired of perfection, and I just want to see the hand present in the work again. Making comics feel like I have permission to remain loose. It more naturally aligns with my sketchbooks and how I love to draw. I mean, I still like doing my fine art work, and am more than happy to provide clients with a cleaner style. There’s nothing wrong with purposeful design, composition and intention. But what I love about comics is they seem more akin to discovery and play.

I feel like there’s a lot that connects with comics that feel more natural and how I want to make work, rather than how I ought to make work or what would please a client. It’s more punk rock. For me, it’s getting to the fun of artmaking that can get lost when you’re too focused on the expectations of meeting deadlines, client work, “career building” and trying to make a name for myself.

Traces: That reminds me of an article that I read from Ted Gioia that discussed our lack of folk music. Not as in Indie Folk as a genre, but folk just playing music in their living rooms. He opines that in childhood, you should encourage just playing music, as in playing with instruments, goofing off, playing badly, and doing it for fun as a good and excellent thing to do. Skill and discipline can come later.

Scott Aasman: That’s a thing I’ve come back to with my students in the classes I teach and in my workshops, like Drawing Goodly Badly and Tending the Garden of Ignorance. It’s important to have things like a sketchbook where you don’t feel like you have to perform as an artist. Instagram and social media have commodified our hobbies and tried to turn them into side hustles instead of things that are just fun or are just good and right to do. So I encourage my students to be able to just step back and draw through exercises that ask to draw with their left hand or with their eyes closed, and in doing so focuses them on process over product, and find that mark making can be surprising and supremely satisfying. Having the freedom to do something poorly is a lost art for our kids and our communities.

Traces: Thank God for folks like you who are finding ways to reach an audience who aren’t looking for words or poetry. But you can catch the eyes looking at more modern art and get a good dose of mythology while their there!

Scott Aasman: That’s the goal!

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Liv Ross is a poet and essayist writing in and from the Ozarks. In addition to writing, Liv practices gardening, pipe-smoking, leather-working, music-making, and mischief. She has been published in The New Verse Review, The Front Porch Republic, Silence and Starsong, Solum Journal, and VoeglinView. She also serves as Managing Editor for Traces Journal. Her first book, The Blackbird Ballad, is scheduled for publishing May 2026 from Solum Literary Press. She can also be found on Instagram @liv_ross_poetry, or her substack, https://substack.com/@theabbeyofcuriosity.

Dorothy Nielsen was interviewed by Meg Freer via a Zoom conversation in the autumn of 2025.

Meg Freer, for Traces: Dorothy, you have a literary background, having been an English professor for many years, with an interest in the religious and metaphysical poetry of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and you’ve written both literary criticism and poetry, including a book of poetry, The Persephone Papers. How did you decide to become a professor? And tell me how some of your first publications came about.

Dorothy Nielsen: I loved literature so much from an early age, and I think that’s what drew me to study it in great depth. Out of that love came writing poetry as well. My first poem was published, to my surprise, when I was nine years old. I remember it forming one night in my head, and the next morning I printed it out. I must have shown it to my teacher because at the end of the year, I was handed a book produced by the board of education that had about 100 poems from kids across the city.

During my university years, I sent some of those many poems I was always writing to student publications, and eventually, I sent a couple, when I was in grad school, to The Fiddlehead. That was my first professional publication.

Traces: And as a professor, you would have written academic articles.

DN: Yes, that was one requisite for getting and keeping my job, and those flowed very naturally out of my PhD dissertation and my teaching interests over the years.

Traces: Did you ever find it difficult to switch between academic and creative writing?

DN: To some degree. That was why when I was a full-time academic, one corner of my study had bookshelves and a computer station for lecture prep, research, and marking, and in another corner, I set up a desk beside my poetry shelf. So I divided myself between two halves of the room.

Traces: Like me, you grew up in the United States and now make your home in Canada. How long have you been in Canada, and where do you consider to be home?

DN: For most of my life, I’ve crisscrossed the border, actually as well as spiritually. When I was eight, my family moved from South Bend, Indiana, to Windsor, Ontario, where I loved living. Being in a border city, I crossed back and forth a lot, often once a week when I played cello in the International Youth Symphony as a teenager. My family went back to live twice in the U.S. when I was ages 9 to 10 and then 17 to 18, and there were a lot of visits because I have so many relatives and in-laws there. Besides having strong family ties in both countries, geographically, I still feel partially rooted in the three states I lived in, which included Connecticut and Minnesota.

Then something happened to me. When I was 27 years old—a Permanent Resident of Canada but a U.S. citizen—my husband and I drove across Canada from Ontario to Victoria, British Columbia. I fell so deeply in love with the lands and skies along the Trans-Canada Highway that I knew by the time I got back, I would become a Canadian citizen, which I did shortly after. So both are home, but in different ways.

Traces: Your poems and essays have appeared in Traces Journal, and you’re now on this journal’s Advisory Board. What are some reasons you enjoy supporting and writing for a journal with a specifically Canadian focus?

DN: I’ve had a visceral and imaginative love of Canadian painting since I was a teenager and lived a block away from an old mansion called Willistead Manor, where the Windsor Art Gallery was housed. I spent hours there, and the gallery’s Canadian landscape paintings really struck a chord in me. These paintings now recall to me, to borrow a term from the Traces mission statement, our ‘shared geography’ along the Trans-Canada Highway that I fell in love with. So I appreciate Traces Journal’s emphasis on both Canadian writing and Canadian visual art.

What’s more, unlike in the U.S., there are very few literary journals in Canada that welcome both free verse and fixed form poems that engage with the Christian tradition. So I think Traces, with this multifaceted ethos, is a vital addition to what we’ve had so little of until recently in Canada.

Traces: As you point out, the difference with Traces Journal is that it incorporates Christian thematic material as well as visual art. It’s interesting that you came to the journal, in a way, through visual art. What role can Traces play in the future of the contemporary Christian arts scene?

DN: I’ve been thinking a lot about the way that Traces integrates heart, mind, body, and soul. I recently finished listening to a series of lectures on contemplative prayer, where the teacher was emphasizing how the Christian faith necessarily involves all four sides of a person working together. I think this is one of the values Traces exemplifies. Of course, we find the heart everywhere in Traces, in the poetry and the visual art, and we have the intellectual tradition in the poems and essays and interviews. And the journal pays close attention to the physical expression of truth, goodness, and beauty by showcasing our rich heritage of visual arts and by publishing beautiful free verse and formalist poetry that draws attention to the musicality of language. Traces feeds our soul with its Christian themes, and on top of all that, it offers the integration of heart and head with Norm Klassen’s column “The Order of Love.” I believe the journal provides an exceptional model of how to weave together these four features of faith.

Traces: Readers of Traces will probably agree with you wholeheartedly. I have a question about integrating one’s faith into the act of writing, particularly intellectual writing. You returned to the Catholic faith a few years ago after a deliberate break with it, and you wrote a philosophical essay about this for Traces—“The Fire that Breaks from Thee.” In that essay, you discuss how your reconversion affected your reading and writing of specifically religious poetry. Tell me a bit more, in everyday language, how creative writing can be an act of faith first, as opposed to an intellectual exercise informed later by faith.

DN: I think I can answer this by telling the story of the integrated arrival of the poem “The Other Dream of Scipio.” One day this summer, I was out walking in nature while I was praying the rosary with soul, mind, and body, along with a heartfelt plea to God for an end to two of our biggest wars. I had just finished my passage of spiritual reading, of C.S. Lewis’s description of Cicero’s “The Dream of Scipio” in The Discarded Image. Suddenly, I was seized by an image of the hero in the upper spheres and by the agonized thought, “I wonder what Scipio, looking down at our war-torn earth, would think of us.” Poetic inspiration zapped my body and soul, and I recognized the signs I experience whenever a poem begins to stir: a sudden thought that I sense is a poetic line, combined with a unique feeling tone, plus a clear image and a burning need to capture all this on paper. I returned to prayer, and when I was done, I immediately started to write. Almost all of the finished work came out very quickly without any planning. As I wrote, I felt a growing sense of gratitude and awe for Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and awe at the courage of dying soldiers, and for anyone who exemplifies Christ’s saying that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends, reflected in crucifixion and sacrifice imagery throughout the piece.

So this poem was born directly as a result of the faith which had allowed me to make that emotionally-charged plea to God and had led me to read a Christian author, in a multifaceted process of religious writing via soul, heart, intellect, and body.

Traces: I personally think that an important aspect of this experience you had is that you were outside walking. Moving our bodies allows for connections we wouldn’t be able to make if we weren’t active. My next question directly follows from that story of your poem’s arrival.

Whether you’re writing lyrical free verse or more formalist poetry, you have an enviable ability to draw together seemingly disparate concepts into a seamless continuity. Heart and mind, soul and intellect, and faith all come together very naturally. For example, in your poem “Dark Matter” in the previous issue of Traces, I liked that you used the pantoum form. The repeated lines really elegantly efface the contrasting images of dark and light, and a child who’s present and not present.

And similarly, in the poem “For Your Death Day,” which appeared in Literary Review of Canada, you write of foundations coming together and apart, earthly and cosmic occurrences, past time and present time. That’s like the Scipio poem, where you had this vision of Scipio up in the heavens looking down on our earth—someone from the past looking at the present. A former student of yours has said about you: “The connections she weaves are not merely literary but experiential, adding up to something larger, something close to transcendence.” It seems this transcendent experience probably couldn’t happen without some basis in faith.

Your Scipio poem wasn’t really planned in advance, in terms of how it was going to look or what literary techniques you were going to use. It was very instinctive, maybe planned in your head as you walked, but is that the way many of your poems happen now? In your current poetry writing practice, how much do you plan out in advance in terms of rhythm, form, and literary techniques? Or is your writing more instinctive, following sparks of inspiration?

DN: What happens to me is always the same, no matter what comes out in the long run, whether in fixed form or as free verse. Spontaneously, one or two lines drop into my head along with a unified intuition that includes an image, a feeling tone, and a multifaceted, complete thought which seems like a skein of wool with a leading thread that I intensely want to unwind in words as I follow it to the end.

The initial writing process is likewise intuitive because I choose my form based on the rhythm of those initial lines, and the first drafts just fall unplanned onto my notebook pages. Sometimes, in the second or third draft, I realize the piece has shaped itself into a different genre and that I’m writing in another fixed form or free verse.

So the first few handwritten drafts are primarily inspiration, or the first 10 or 15, because I write out about 20 to 40 drafts of any one poem, a new draft each time I make even a minor adjustment. In the later drafts, there’s more strategizing, which might include, say, the substitution of more harmonized metaphors, but it is concerned with how to stay true to that original integrated ‘zap’ that came into my soul, mind, heart and gut. The editing takes more time, but the initial multifaceted intuition makes up most of the final text.

Even if I am thinking of writing formalist poetry, for example, for the fixed form groups I meet with, I always trust instinct, and the groups stipulate that we should remain open, no matter what genre we are aiming for, to writing in any style—fixed form, free verse, or prose—that might take us by surprise. Once, a member even ended up making a collage.

Traces: That feels like a familiar process to me, and even the skein of wool image is evocative for me, because a skein of wool is itself a fixed form. The way you pull the wool out is not a straight line, and it doesn’t always unravel the way you think it’s going to unravel. I think that applies to many art forms. You can start with a design you have sketched out, but once you get going with the rhythm of whatever it is you’re doing, sending the shuttle back and forth, or spinning, your instinct might take it in a different direction in the end.

You are a musician. What relative importance do musical elements play in your poems: rhythm, structure, narrative, the imaginative element? Do you find a musical connection, or does the connection happen instinctively because you’re a musician first?

DN: When I was twelve, I started playing cello and also devouring the musical sonnets and other formalist poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The immersion in both arts has attuned me to the role of the body involved in making all styles of poetry by teaching me not only to highly value the sounds, rhythms, and tones of a literary composition but also to recognize the physical ‘zap’ that happens when a poem is making itself known.

And both arts primed me to seek in my reading and writing the wild depths and heights of imagination and emotion that a lot of my favourite writers—and composers—take me to, even when they begin with everyday images. For example, Denise Levertov, the poet I’ve written most of my literary essays about, uses what’s known as the ‘Deep Image’ when she meticulously describes “the here and now” in such a way that everyday details become a portal to psychological, spiritual, and divine planes.

Traces: There’s a lot of discipline required in learning to play any instrument at a high level. Classical music training, at least the way I was taught, was very structured in terms of learning music theory and learning to read someone else’s notes on the page. I wasn’t taught to improvise. The way you describe your writing process is not rigid like that at all, but there still must be that discipline that we have learned as classical musicians. How do you relate the musical training to your poetry in terms of discipline? Do you think it has either restricted or released possibilities for poetry?

DN: I think this kind of disciplined training in musical forms and theory has always helped me write poetry in traditional genres. Fixed poetic forms inhabit my head partly because I immersed myself in them by reading formalist poems at the same time I studied cello and music theory, even while I was also studying the grammatical patterns of English and other languages. Every time we train ourselves to recognize the beauty of any artistic structure or linguistic form—along with the paradoxical freedom found through all these structures to fully access a poetic intuition—we strengthen our ability to recognize beauty in traditional genres or free verse and to create it freely in our own writing.

Traces: You get that ‘zap,’ as you say, which is already a reward before you start writing. Or if you’re working on a piece of music and suddenly you play a phrase just the way you’ve wanted to, that’s a reward in itself. Is the process of learning a piece or writing a poem the reward, or is it when you think your poem or piece of music is ready to share with other people?

DN: My writing process has always included the desire for a completed, ready-to-share artifact because the initial intuitive inspiration entails an intense need to make it into the form of a work on a page, a product that looks like the mysterious poems I loved the look of in books as a preschooler, even before I knew how to read.

However, once a poem is polished and ready to be read, I might keep it private for years or forever. I have written hundreds of finalized poems, but I only desire to publish a small percentage. I complete many as what’s been called ‘soul writing’—just experiencing the process for the sake of my soul.

Traces: Back to the poem “The Other Dream of Scipio,” it’s a meditation on what the ancient Greek general would think if he were looking down from the heavens on our present chaotic world. And it’s such a bleak view. But your poem has a lyric flow to a hopeful ending, that maybe Scipio would hear the heavenly music that promises we’re not aimlessly wandering in the cosmos until our death, and that we have a place ‘among the stars,’ as you put it. I find a lot of hope and joy in this poem despite its premise. I’m wondering, now that you have said this poem came mostly by instinct as a result of reading C.S. Lewis, do hope and joy often play a part in your creative process? Is that something you’re interested in expressing?

DN: When these feelings flow from the original multifaceted intuition, yes. About a third of my published poetry reflects pure joy, another third is woeful and worrying, and the rest is a mix of light and dark, along with neutral-toned works. In the Spring 2025 issue of Calla Press Journal, Living in Wonder, the editors laid out three of my poems in a two-page spread, and at a glance you can see pieces that range from a joyful celebration of marriage with just a hint of life’s complexities, through a simple statement of delight in the memory of watching a boy running with a dog, to a mournful midlife meditation on time passing. Since my own poetry arises from my intuitive “feeling/thinking” experiences, it will necessarily reflect all the shades of light and dark I encounter in the world and inside myself.

Traces: I think you have to feel you have balance in your life to be able to write a balanced output like that.

DN: And you have to want to share it. There are some sides certain poets just don’t want to show in public, of course. Though it might sometimes be risky to bury them. Denise Levertov wrote an essay when the poet Anne Sexton committed suicide, in which she blamed Sexton’s audience, editors, and publishers for egging her on by valuing only her darkest confessional works. Levertov warned young poets: Don’t just dwell on one side of yourself. If you can, explore the positive in life. Don’t become a tragic poet just because that’s what’s selling right now. Naturally, though, some people do live a life that is either predominantly sorrowful or joyful, and certain wonderful poets I read choose for whatever reason to show only one side of life.

Traces: How have you balanced these varied but complementary interests of music, teaching, writing literary criticism and poetry, while also navigating family and career responsibilities?

DN: I’ve always opted to put onto the back burner any interests that aren’t my main duty at the time. When I started grad school, I quit the musicians’ union and stopped accepting playing gigs. Years later, when I became a mother, I resigned my full-time academic position so that I could focus on that role for a couple of decades, and when I went back, I taught only part-time. These are the reasons that I didn’t set out to publish much poetry until I was well into my 50s.

Traces: What projects are you working on now, or do you let ideas happen without having bigger names for them, like ‘project’?

DN: I’ve been putting together a collection of poems. My forms and themes have evolved a lot since my collection The Persephone Papers appeared twelve years ago, so I’ve been gathering recent poems to present a different side of my work.

Traces: You have a teaching legacy, and now you’d like to leave a poetic legacy in the form of a new collection. Are there any other creative legacies?

DN: I didn’t realize how much it would mean to me that one of my legacies would be the pleasure of watching students take up creative, literary work.

Traces: That’s both a personal legacy and an academic legacy.

DN: That’s true! I find that one of the many gifts of getting old is having a long perspective that lets me recognize previously unseen meanings of past actions and events. Nowadays, one of my favourite passages from T.S. Eliot comes at the point in “Little Gidding” that describes a former intention being “only a shell, a husk of meaning/ From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled.”

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Meg Freer grew up in Montana and now lives in Kingston, Ontario. She holds two music degrees and a creative writing certificate and is a member of The Ontario Poetry Society and League of Canadian Poets. She is also Poetry Co-editor for The Sunlight Press, a Contributing Editor for Traces Journal, and co-host of a monthly series featuring poetry performed simultaneously with live improvised music. Her prose, photos, and poems have been published in many journals and in four chapbooks. During 2024-25, she served as Poet-in-Residence for the McDonald Astroparticle Physics Institute at Queen’s University.

Daniel Cowper was interviewed by Maya Venters via Zoom in October, 2025.

Maya Venters for Traces: In your essay “From Dawn to Dawn: On Writing a Novel in Verse,” in The Woodlot, you highlight the Canadian influences on your love of the Verse Novel, such as Robert Service and Loreena McKennitt’s setting of Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot.” Can you speak more to the influences of Canadian art on your own aesthetic and artistic development?

Daniel Cowper: There are a few ways I’ve been shaped by my local artistic culture. When I was growing up, we had a lot of Canadian art on the walls. My grandfather collected Inuit art, so we have a number of prints of Kenojuak Ashevak, whose work is beautiful and very specific to her landscape.

Inuit art is fascinating because it’s an artistic tradition which was latent in a cultural imagination. But when they received tools that allowed them to express that more fully, there was an enormous flowering of visual art. A lot of Canadian art has an imagination that’s shaped by the landscape, and I identify with that.

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I grew up in a place where nature is very powerful, so my sensibility is shaped by that environment. I tend to see things through the lens of a particular environment. I think the same thing could be said of the West Coast’s indigenous art which was present in my childhood. Bill Reid‘s art was very common and Robert Bringhurst‘s translations and adaptations of Haida Legends were a big part of my upbringing.

In Kingdom of the Clock, Viró is a half-Inuit sculptor working in the Cape Dorset artistic tradition. So, you can see the influence of the kind of Canadian art I was exposed to and responded to when I was younger.

Traces: I’m fascinated by Canadian artist’s continued preoccupation with the wilderness, from coast to coast, rural to urban. Anyone who knows Vancouver will immediately see its influence on the setting of the KTC: the wilderness encroaches on alleyways and offices, and characters encounter the grandeur of mountains and the sea, or wildlife like a seal, bear, and owl.

DC: Yeah, and something peculiar about Canadian cities and West Coast cities in particular is how new they are. Few people in Vancouver are historically from Vancouver.

I dedicated the book to my grandmother who was from Vancouver and knew the city and its history in a very intimate way. But the city is constituted of people who come there from outside of the city. Canadian cities, more than most, have this strange nature of being occupied by outsiders who feel a certain ambiguity towards the city.

So, escape is always on their minds. If you ask people from Vancouver or Toronto if they ever thought about leaving the city, almost everybody will say, “I’ve always wanted to move out to one of the islands or to the lake country.”

In the podcast The Rest is History, the hosts were talking about ancient cities, saying that cities have historically sustained themselves by attracting people from outside of them. Within the city, more people die than are born. So the city will die out unless they attract new people from outside.

Traces: Something that is interesting about Canada’s multicultural history, is the way in which many oral storytelling cultures have overlapped. There are the Inuit and indigenous storytelling traditions, as well as the storytelling traditions of early settlers, varying widely from East to West, French Canada, and the far North. Have you been influenced by this amalgamation of storytelling cultures in Canada?

DC: The history of storytelling in Canada is interesting. But we’re still such a new country undergoing a maturation process in terms of artistic culture. I think there are more writers now that are starting to say, “I’m just going to make great art.” And I think making great art is more possible now than ever for Canadian artists.

In terms of Canadian storytelling, Robert Service is really foundational. He’s an important cultural force. Many Canadians’ experience of literary art comes from “The Cremation of Sam McGee” or other great Service poems. They’re so compelling in terms of the stories that they tell, the imagery of characters and the land, and in the way they sound.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold…

There are many Canadians who are not exposed to the arts but who know Robert Service poems by heart, and I think that’s a natural extension of these storytelling traditions.

The culture on the west coast has always been fragmented. This is a challenge, but there is also something special about it. In the last 18th and early 19th century, there were many cultures: First Nations, Métis, Scottish, French, Russian and then the addition of Japanese, Pacific Islanders, and Chinese. These distinct cultures lived cheek by jowl, and they did so very successfully until the late 19th century.

I think this is a special quality of the west coast which is often forgotten. I try to use Chinook Jargon, which is the lost language of the west coast from this time. In the 19th century, there was a syncretic language used for trade, made up of First Nations languages, English, French, Russian, Japanese, and Hawaiian. It was widely spoken until the age of radio stamped it out. But its words are beautiful, and are survivors of this multicultural stage in the history of BC.

There’s an element of this in Kingdom of the Clock. The Kingdom is a city full of people from different cultural backgrounds working cooperatively rather than in conflict with each other. Although there is a lot of conflict in the book, there’s an element of idealism too, reminiscent of that old syncretism in BC. These are the seeds for a kind of art and a kind of society which might be healthier than what we have right now.

Traces: So many Canadian cities share this contemporary multiculturalism, but also this multicultural history that you’re talking about, and I love the way that’s reflected in KTC.

Your characters come from all over the map, yet they are all united in different ways through their experiences with beauty, the sublime, forgiveness, or grace. Maggie Burton’s review on KTC’s back cover says this book “exposes us all as equally flawed, yet equally capable of giving and receiving grace.” Can you talk about the role of these fundamental principles of human nature in KTC?

DC: Cities impose a kind of urgency on people. Farmers respond to annual cycles, but in the city, people work hour by hour, dealing with a daily cycle full of demands and problems that need to be addressed.

There’s a sense in which inhabitants of cities are just trying to keep their heads above water. But life is bigger than that. So somebody who succeeds in amassing wealth might not be happy; they might not have anything that makes life worth living. There are universal needs of human beings for love, companionship, family, and to see the next generation flourish.

There’s a character, Feng, in KTC who’s taking care of her daughter who has a declining schizophrenic condition. Feng is powerless, despite wanting to help her daughter. And I think that’s another thing that people experience in their relationships universally: that the people who need the most help are the hardest people to help.

These touch on universal realities of life: we struggle to connect with others and when we do connect with others, it challenges us. I wanted to write about how those connections can be built and maintained, and the challenges we have in ministering to each other in our relationships.

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Traces: KTC perfectly captures contemporary city life. Some of the book’s details transcend time, but then you throw in elements like Peppa Pig. In thinking about the next generation of readers and artists, in what way does KTC capture our particular historical and cultural moment?

DC: Something quite unusual about our time is that we give people fewer tools to think about life than we used to. I think past societies would arm young people much better for facing life’s challenges; with an understanding of different values and visions of what a good life can look like.

And I think the arts have been part of the problem. The arts have developed a bad habit of speaking to themselves. There are lots of great poems about being a poet, but I would rather see great poems about being a good parent, or the child of aging parents, or how to be somebody who overcomes the challenges in our lives.

So many people are adrift and it’s sad to see. Many of us have lost friends who found themselves unable to cope with life, and we don’t talk about this. I tried to talk about it in KTC. The city hides how close the knife cuts to the bone, and the anonymity and lack of intimacy between neighbours means we don’t share our real stories when things go wrong in life.

But then when you know someone and you speak with them, you learn something about the power of the human spirit. When you’re not living in a real community, you don’t get exposed to other people’s experiences of life and you don’t get to see what they do. Of course, there are beautiful relationships in cities, they’re just harder to access because people cherish their anonymity.

Traces: I think the pandemic was a wakeup call for many people, especially in the city. It forced us to face the realities of our lives in new, even shocking ways. The characters in KTC repeat the question, “What is it all for?” And this was a question on a lot of people’s minds during the pandemic. People moved to the country, quit their corporate jobs, connected with their neighbours or families in different ways, and began to pursue the things they truly love.

You’ve spoken about how the pandemic gave you space to return to writing KTC. But can you talk more about how the pandemic, as a cultural moment, impacted you?

DC: On a personal level, the major impact was on us as parents, because we had a one-year-old when the pandemic started. He was trying to pick up on social signals and learn how to deal with other human beings, and people’s behaviour changed so radically at that time in a very disorienting way. So his social development was really impeded. During the most intense lockdowns, he became afraid of other people, which is something he’s still recovering from.

I’m interested in the way many people reacted to this idea of the “new normal.” Many people thought we’d never return to our old ways of interacting with one another. I think that’s because, even though we long for companionship and connection, there’s also an opposite impulse towards isolation and the control that comes from isolation. If you don’t have other people around you, you don’t have to deal with their needs, or the ways they obstruct your pursuit of your desires. And while some people sought connection within the restrictions of our environment, I think others became addicted to that isolation.

I think my family gained an appreciation of being open to other people. I grew up on Bowen Island, but we moved back when our first child was born. And then we had a second baby during the pandemic. So, we came out of the pandemic pretty rooted on Bowen Island.

During the summer of 2020, we were down at the dock in the cove and I saw a guy sitting by himself, reading. I talked to him and discovered he was alone for the day. So I invited him to go swimming with our family and then over for dinner. Then, a couple of years later, he came back to visit us on Bowen Island and he told me that the day we met was the lowest point of his entire life. But he said that day was also the turning point for him; he felt like we had ministered to him and it had been a real gift. I’ve gained an appreciation for the special things that can happen if you open yourself up to connecting with new people. I used to be more socially passive and reactive, but I try to be more proactive now, more willing to invite others rather than waiting for an invitation myself.

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Traces: Your wife, Emily Osborne, is also a writer. How has being writer-parents impacted your family and the ways you connect with others?

DC: There’s the wonderful proverb “iron sharpens iron,” and for us, that is profoundly true. It’s really joyful and stimulating to have a spouse who can read drafts, discuss your work, and share in your excitement about the projects you’re working on.

In terms of parenting, we read to our two little boys every day. It’s been a huge thing for them to have powerful stories read to them. When I read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader to our oldest, Edmund, it fired his imagination. And even literature which is less beautiful can still be great for kids. When we read the first two Harry Potter books, Edmund started wondering if he was spoiled, like Harry Potter’s spoiled cousin, Dudley Dursley. The story invoked in him a self-awareness, an aspiration to be a better person, which is exactly what you want to arouse in kids. You want them to aspire to be good without being too hard on themselves.

I think parenting involves offering kids positive and negative examples of what to do and what not to do. And I think literature can inspire kids to be brave and good in a fun way.

I’ve been working on a children’s novel and Emily has encouraged me to read it to our boys. I can’t take that kind of thing for granted; the kind of encouragement you get from a spouse who understands. Poetry is such a non-economical use of time. There are compromises in every marriage, but if you are both poets, you can understand the need to allocate time and prioritize which, which I think a less-understanding spouse might view as self-indulgence.

Traces: Listening to you talk about your family’s life on Bowen Island, surrounded by beauty, love, and good books, I’m also thinking about the pervading malaise in Canada right now, especially in our cities. As a parent and a writer, what is giving you hope during this strange, uncertain time?

DC: Parenting is a really beautiful experience. Even before your child is born, you get to experience a little bit of the personality of the child because children move differently in the womb. Then there’s this revelation when you get to meet a little person who has human needs, no way of hiding them, and who doesn’t know that they should try to hide them.

When Edmund was born in the hospital, he was so tired that he couldn’t suckle, but he wanted to lie on his mom and caress her and have her talk to him, because even though he was so exhausted, he still needed to give and receive love. And the truth is that all people fundamentally need to give and receive love more than they need anything else. You can see that in children, but it gets harder to see in adults as we learn to be less vulnerable.

Children are also hungry for beauty. They want to stop and look at the light through the trees. They want to see you. They want to play with the milkweed seeds, pull them out, let them fly, and watch them blow away. They want to learn about things. If you get to spend time with your children, I think it’s hard not to be reminded of just how wonderful human beings are.

Pascal wrote a little memorandum of a mystical vision he had that changed his life, called the “Memorial.” In one of the lines, he says the truth of human beings is in the “grandeur of the human soul,” the more you get to see people up close the more you appreciate how true that is.

So, from that perspective, I’m always very hopeful because I think people are wonderful and I think that the world is wonderful and I want people to flourish in the world and I want the world to flourish as much as it can. Generally speaking, I believe that people will flourish and that they flourish naturally. You just have to let them.

Because I’m from a small town, I’ve seen a lot of people grow up. And I’ve seen a lot of people grow up who have been unable to imagine how to be happy, or what a happy life can look like. Many people are able to exclude paths in life but are not able to find one that has any integrity or any joy in it. I think, in theory, artists can help by offering different visions of human flourishing for people to live into. But I don’t think that’s what the Canadian artistic culture has excelled in in recent years.

We’ve been much better at excluding possibilities rather than offering possibilities. But that’s starting to change. There’s been greater artistic ambition in recent years in Canadian art, and hopefully we start to see more positive, life-affirming art.

I think it’s important that the way art works within a culture is not just about the artists producing the art. It’s also about people who receive art, and how artists present their work to others. There are issues with public institutions like art museums, but also cities generally, and the kinds of art they choose to promote and present. For example, if you look at the art presented at institutions in Vancouver, it tends to be quite negative and grotesque, and we need to get out of that cycle. My first book, Grotesque Tenderness, has a lot of grotesque elements, but I’ve come to believe that the grotesque is one of the cheaper aesthetic effects.

As a culture, we overvalue art which makes life seem meaningless. And I think we need to start coming back to art that is not only beautiful, but also healthy for people to receive.

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is the Editor-in-chief of Traces Journal. She is a poet, editor, and artist. Her chapbook Life Cycle of a Mayfly won the Vallum Chapbook Prize. She received an MFA from the University of St. Thomas (TX), a BA in English Literature from the University of Waterloo, and a diploma in the History of Art from Trinity College, Dublin. Maya has published in Rattle, The Literary Review of Canada, and Literary Matters, among others. She can be found at mayaventers.ca.

More recently, he has been drawn into the world of poetry, which has given him a way to articulate more directly certain aspects of these worlds: in celebration and lament, in overview and intimate touch. But then, the drawings have always been poetry.

James Tughan was interviewed by D.S. Martin over a series of email exchanges following the opening night of Tughan’s Nine Faces of Christ exhibition.

When my wife and I walked into Toronto’s RZIM gallery in the CBC Building in 2019 for the opening of James Tughan’s Nine Faces of Christ, I didn’t know what to think.

I had encountered the drawings of James Tughan through the years — through the Christian Arts organization Imago, through numerous pieces hanging in such places as McMaster Divinity College and Tyndale University, and through a feature in Image journal from 2018 — all of which gave me the impression of an artist whose vision ranged from realistic images of the natural world to the intriguing fantasy-scapes of his Dreaming of Lions series. I was ill-prepared, however, when we attended his opening for Nine Faces of Christ.

I am a poet, not a visual artist — not one experienced at drawing subtle meanings from an image. The meanings of a word can be found in a dictionary. Written allusions can be easily researched. Where might I find help in interpreting a drawing?

In Dreaming of Lions — a sequence of pastel drawings that takes up about 90 feet of running wall space — even though the images are other-worldly, what I see there seems to be like what I would see if such a fantasy world were to materialize in front of me. Tughan expressed in those days:

JT: In my work as a pastel artist, my adaptation of realism is what I call Cartographic Realism, a marriage of aerial visual mapping, natural symbolism and a Christian theology of the person. This style of imagery respectfully draws metaphors for the seen and unseen world of spirit from the natural surface topography of the visual subject matter itself.

In recent years, James Tughan and I have often met for coffee, but in order to focus his wonderfully rambling mind, I thought that a mutually-edited, back-and-forth email dialogue might best help me to elicit from James what has been puzzling me about Nine Faces. To communicate his history up until this point, James said:

JT: The Dreaming of Lions is a garden story, and like all imagery involving plants, what we don’t see before the early shoots raise their heads out of the ground, is all the inseminating variables in the soil and air that determine what we see later.

In my case this includes an upbringing in suburbia, evangelical Christianity, early toxic family life, architecture, Fine Art and theology education, wilderness canoeing, and global exposure in the Communication Arts as an illustrator.

One of my final assignments — during the time my career was focused on editorial illustration — was to draw gardens all over the USA for House & Garden Magazine. This project taught me almost everything I know about plants and gardens, which are extensions of their owners’ worldviews and domestic relationships.

My very last assignment was the Pinball project (1994) for the Ontario government, depicting the working conditions of artists in the industry I worked in. This project provoked me to leave the industry and work on subject matter that integrated the worlds of theology, art, and psychology.

I needed a way to depict more levels of reality than just aesthetics alone. I needed a realism that incorporated aesthetics, theology, and psychology, which together unpack layers of reality both visible and invisible.

This four and a half year drawing project began in 1997. It was added to with a third level of works, very recently in 2023. The purpose of this metanarrative study was to support Christians in their experience of trial and adversity, although it first began as my way of describing coming out of clinical depression.

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James Tughan has been described by fellow artist Terry Black as “the leading artist in his medium, chalk pencil.” Black calls it “a merciless medium that demands discipline and labour.”

This, I can certainly appreciate.

James has frequently written poems to accompany his images. I selected eight of his poems for my anthology In A Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets (Poiema/Cascade, 2019) and one of his images, “Snagged,” for the cover art.

Perhaps what I encountered in the Nine Faces of Christ exhibit (in part) was a demonstration that, although I could interpret literally the scenes from Dreaming of Lions, I hadn’t engaged deeply enough with them to know what they are saying. I was only a casual viewer, appreciating the skill involved in producing them.

The problem I faced when viewing Nine Faces of Christ was that they didn’t seem content to have me as a passive observer. Now that I was viewing Nine Faces, their surrealistic quality left me rather lost at sea.

In his beautiful new book Contact: The Artistry of Jesus in Nine Faces (Nadir Publishing, 2023), written to accompany his drawings, Tughan presents to us a new way of looking at Jesus of Nazareth: that is, to see Jesus as an Artist. To get at this, I asked James what evidence he would give to the skeptics to demonstrate that Jesus is indeed an artist. He responded:

JT: There are several stunning indicators of this. The first is scripture itself, which, beginning with John 1, clearly aligns the logos —“word” — with Jesus as the most visible architect of Creation.

This is echoed in the repeated signs of the extreme creativity of God interacting with humankind, and our constant meanderings from truthfulness: the theophanies, his myriad responses to Israel’s descent from theocracy to captivity and back, and especially the imaginative and perhaps revolutionary ministry of Jesus to individual persons and institutions. I also believe that the language elements of art that visual artists work with daily in their design and craft practice can be shown to exist in the work of Jesus.

In Nine Faces, I try to show how those elements at work suggest that Jesus is thinking like an artist all along, (in the chapter called ‘Incarnation’) as he tries to recover his original handiwork. We have theologians like N.T. Wright to remind us also that since the resurrection, He is continuing the process of restoration, in spite of our catastrophic shortcomings.

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I then revealed my vulnerability as an Art appreciator to James:

D.S.M: As I look at the nine portraits in your drawing series, The Nine Faces of Christ, James, I see faces... sort of; that is, I see images with objects positioned to suggest faces, with the title Nine Faces prodding us to try to see them as faces. In ‘Creation’ a canoe suggests a nose; in ‘Dispersion’ the circle of a tambourine makes us see it as a head; when we reach the fourth picture ‘Incarnation’ there is definitely a face — one that looks like it might even be your own self-portrait but with a baguette affixed to the forehead with a small clasp and finishing nails, and with a fish-wrapped wine bottle shoved sideways into his mouth. These obstacles make it hard to know for sure.

James (I think patiently) responded:

JT: Nine Faces is a surrealist narrative about a descent from creative freedom into betrayal, legalistic bondage and then resurrection again to concrete reunion with the original artist and real hope of restoration.

Each of these images are nine different portraits of Jesus, surrealistically made up of objects, whimsically portrayed as scientific collages, while the background slowly disintegrates and is replaced by Jesus portrayed as flying welder. There is a lot of tongue in cheek playing around with biblical metaphor, which I think may be useful in our community that makes theology so incredibly serious. Some of that trompe l’oeil treatment of metaphor comes out of my own life, some from Old and New Testament history.

The Incarnation references are not to myself, but to someone wearing a plastic party mask (look closely) in a piece that has everything to do with Israel’s attempt at an ultimate misappropriation and containment of the Messiah promise.

And so, I asked James to tell us about his approach to making meaning in this series as a whole, and how we as viewers are to approach it.

JT: The whole sequence might be best appreciated by persons more familiar with scripture, but there is another progression of structural metaphor from curvilinear forms to box-like, angular containment and then explosive freedom, that really is most recognizable to persons betrayed by various kinds of trauma.

This imagery was designed to not be obvious, but imaginative, playful and thought-provoking, just as Dreaming of Lions asks us to see a God-like character in a harlequin juggler, and Godspell portrays him as a baseball yard street clown. I think what artists are called to do is refresh shopworn metaphors while still continuing the core truths God has himself put to us. This is something Jesus also did by the well. Take for example references to bread, water, the Passover lamb, the temple references and his reworking of Moses’ brass serpent and Jesus’ cross. (This is an artistic device of rhythm and referential metaphor.) This parable-like imagery was designed with the viewer’s intelligence, imagination, and sense of humour in mind.

Spoiler alert: There is one more device involved, that is more obvious perhaps in the real physical installation than the book, but has to do with the station point (where the viewer is standing relative to the imagery). This also is a trompe l’oeil way of involving the viewer in the story. This book also ultimately reminds us of Jesus’ artistry in making contact with us individually, speaking in terms that respect and challenge our individual value in Creation.

I believe that what’s needed for someone to make a poem their own, is to spend time reading it carefully, drawing insights from it, and discovering the ways it resonates for them — similar to how we draw meaning from scripture. I’d even go so far as to say that a poem isn’t a poem until it is read. What’s needed for us to make a work of visual art our own, I suspect, is quite similar. I wondered what James might say to this.

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JT: Yes, every visual artist, in whatever stylistic language they are working in, whether they admit it or not, is working to seduce the viewer (spatially) into the world they are imagining. It can be renaissance realism or post-modern abstract expressionism. We want people to come into this world and walk around, to engage the mystery of these spaces and colours.

In the case of work with known or less familiar symbols, there is another kind of play going on with associations and recollection of reasoned ideas. There is a playfulness possible with the rational side of how we engage the world around us as much as the purely aesthetic.

The viewer is, in point of fact, being asked to do some work, in the same way Jesus’ parables ask his sometimes confounded disciples to think with their hearts and minds at the same time. In the case of Nine Faces, what you discover is the experience of overcoming trauma with creativity.

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D.S. Martin is Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, the Series Editor for the Poiema Poetry Series from Cascade Books, and serves on the Advisory Board for Traces. His poetry collection The Role of the Moon is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

This conversation was conducted in anticipation of Guite’s forthcoming project, “Merlin’s Isle,” a retelling of the Arthurian legends in verse. The first volume, “Galahad and the Grail” is expected in the spring of 2026, followed by volumes 2-4 in 2027 and 2028.

He was interviewed by Sarah Emtage for Traces Journal via Zoom in August, 2024. 

Sarah Emtage for Traces: How do you view your role as an artist alongside your relationship with God?

Malcolm Guite: It is important to me to know that I am a created being, a creature, a work of somebody else's authorship. I see my life itself as a kind of poem which God is still in the process of making and which I'm cooperating and collaborating with Him. 

It follows that I'm made in the image of a maker, and as Tolkien says in the Mythopoeia poem, “We make still by the law in which we're made.” I see my own ‘creative’ faculties, such as they are, as some part of the image of God in me. The reason why I put the word ‘creative’ in inverted commas is simply that the kind and quality of God's creation is radically different from our own in that God creates everything ex nihilo. We have to receive something before we can create. 

I dislike the word “original” in the sense of striving for originality. Nothing is original in the sense that we didn't originate anything. God originated everything. I inherit a language which is the work of hundreds of thousands of anonymous poets making words which are all metaphors, and then I receive a poetic tradition. I'm involved in a long conversation. I'm not claiming anything exclusive or definitive about it. I would ban the words exclusive and definitive from any sense of what creative writing is. It's never exclusive. It's always part of a tradition. It's never definitive. There is always more to be unravelled and opened out. I see my vocation as a writer as a calling by the God who made me to be this kind of person and make this kind of work.

Traces: Tell me more about your background in Canada. You were born in Nigeria and then your family moved to Canada. Is that correct?

MG: We were in Nigeria and then Zimbabwe. We left Zimbabwe rather hurriedly and ended up briefly in Cambridge, England. My dad got a job in Canada at McMaster University in '67, the centenary year of Canada, when I was nine years old. We sailed over on a ship and travelled up the St. Lawrence Seaway. From ‘67 through to ‘71 I lived in Hamilton. I went to a regular grade school and then junior high and was sort of becoming Canadian. 

I listened to the Canadian classics: Leonard Cohen, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and The Band. But when I was fourteen my Dad sent me and my sister over to England and I became an English boarding school boy with a uniform, strict rules, and dorm inspections. It was not in the least congenial to me. I was very homesick and I didn't particularly like it, but the great thing was that I began to discover written poetry. 

My mother recited a lot of poetry, but at school I discovered Keats, Shelly, and the great Romantics, and through them everybody else. It turned out that I was good at English. I couldn't believe that English was a subject because reading and writing were what I did for pleasure.

During term time I was an English schoolboy – buttoned up and deep into literature – and then I transformed on the plane mid-Atlantic and I became a Canadian teenager again – going to folk concerts,hanging out with my other long-haired friends, and grooving to Neil Young. It was a weird double life, but I liked both sides of it.Then in ‘77, I won a scholarship and got a place at Cambridge University. Before that it would have been an open question “Am I Canadian or am I British?” The combination of decent beer and an ancient university which could be enjoyed together made me realize I was British. 

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Traces: You mentioned many of your favourite Canadian musicians. Who are your favourite Canadian writers? 

MG: When I was in grade school and junior high, one of the authors I enjoyed was Farley Mowat. Mowat wrote wonderful stories set in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland often about the schooners and the fishermen. I’ve always loved the sea and ships so I love those Farley Mowat books. I listened to Leonard Cohen as a songwriter but soon realized he was a poet and bought his poetry books as well. The main Canadian influence in my mid to late teens was more musical than literary, but the music was literary in its own way. Joni Mitchell is a great poet. In the 70s you could still go to folk cafes where everybody remembered the last time Neil or Joni played there. 

In 2011, I met the Canadian singer-songwriter, Steve Bell, and we became mutual fans. I loved his singing and songwriting and he liked my poetry. We have had a long, rich collaboration which has brought me to Canada several times since. 

Traces: It is interesting to consider how Canada and Britain have shaped you as an artist. As you are now creating your own Arthuriad, Merlin’s Isle, could you talk about what it means that the stories of King Arthur are called the Matter of Britain? 

MG: I love the phrase: “The Matter of Britain.” It's a medieval phrase. It goes back to the idea that poets weren't supposed to be thinking of original things. They were supposed to be retelling the great stories in the most beautiful way possible. There were three matters or subject matters: the matter of Troy which included The Iliad and The Odyssey, the matter of Gaul with the extraordinary figure of Charlemagne, and the matter of Britain. 

Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote about King Arthur in the Historia Regum Britanniae and claimed to be chronicling history. He was not a person of deep spiritual sensibility. Then other writers, including Robert de Boron and Chrétien de Troyes, introduce the theme of the Holy Grail which asks the question: What happens when the highest worldly standard, which was chivalry, comes against the radical inbreaking of grace and the kingdom of God represented by the Grail? The answer is that the worldly standard, great as it is, is not great enough. It needs to be let go. It's broken. Its flaws are exposed and then a new dispensation has to come, which is grounded in the Kingdom of God. Lancelot cannot achieve the Grail because his mind is divided. The Quest of the Grail asks what would happen if the consecration of the Eucharist suddenly arrived in the middle of the greatest of the secular courts. How would they cope? What flaws would it expose? What graces would it require? And that's obviously of interest to me both as a priest and a poet. 

Traces: What does it mean to you personally to be taking up this tale?

MG: It means a huge amount partly because I've known these stories since before I could read. My mother would tell me these stories. I had a little shield covered in cloth, my mother had knitted me chain mail out of silver-painted string, and I had a wooden sword for playing games in the garden.

I realized early that Lancelot was the kind of person who is captain of the rugby team and I knew I was never going to be that boy, but Galahad was somebody who heard the elfin voices, who went on these extraordinary quests, who could see and hear and feel more, and who had this particular calling to see and respond to the numinous. I always played at being Galahad rather Lancelot. When I first started to think I might be a poet, it was not entirely from my mind that I might one day write an Arthur poem. Around that time, I wrote some of T. H. White’s transformation scenes into Spencerian stanzas, particularly the one where Merlin and Arthur are turned into fish, so I was already trying it out. 

My main problem was how to do it. I wanted to do it in poetry, but there was no example of long narrative poetry in the age in which I was living; though, I could see that high modernist poets had touched on it: Elliot's poem The Wasteland, David Jones, and Charles Williams. Jones and Williams are high modernists not writing for the general reader. They're writing poetry consisting almost entirely of a network of hidden illusions, and they're bristling with footnotes. For a long time, I thought that was the only way you could go forward because I was living after these people, but at the same time, that's not how I wanted to tell the story. So, I decided,“this is a thing I'll do when I can work out the form.” 

In the meantime, I wrote my big book on Coleridge, and was deeply immersed in the way Coleridge completely transforms the ballad form; even then, I wasn't seeing the obvious. It wasn't until Rabbit Room wrote to me, and said, “look, we're doing this book called The Lost Tales of Galahad. Would you like to write a Galahad story?” that something clicked. The day the email arrived I was going to fill out a tax return form, so obviously, I was desperate to procrastinate. But I became completely absorbed. In two days I wrote Galahad and the Naiad. 

By the time I’d finished it, I realized I’d found my form. On the one hand, the ballad allows for all kinds of poetic effects and it can be allusive to many other works, but on the other hand, it has a good thumping metre, making ita page-turner. I had dreams already, which I've not given up, that as well as existing as a book and an audiobook,  this poem could become a series of live performances. The ballad is incredibly good for that. 

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Traces:  Can you talk a bit more about the ballad as a poetic form?

MG: Well, there's a thing called the common ballad metre. Ballads were originally sung or chanted, and they were widespread throughout the British Isles. Essentially, in a pre-literate age, it was a way of telling a memorable story. It found a form which was usually a four-line verse with an abcb rhyme pattern, and which alternated four and three stresses per line. So you've got four lines in a traditional ballad with only two rhymes, though sometimes you had internal rhymes. Within those stresses, you have a lot of freedom. Just think of the opening of “The Ancient Mariner,” where Coleridge is adapting a ballad form: 

It is an ancient Mariner,

And he stoppeth one of three.

See, that's the shorter line. 

By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

No rhyme there. 

Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?

So it's actually quite easy to write. Now, of course, people elaborated on it, and often, wrote all kinds of internal rhymes. 

The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,

And I am next of kin;

The guests are met, the feast is set:

May'st hear the merry din.

You see where the un-rhymed line has an internal rhyme? Coleridge takes that four-line, two-rhyme, strongly metered thing and opens it up, and sometimes puts in a whole series of three or four internally rhyming lines before you get the payoff of the final rhyme. 

Traces: What sets your retelling apart from past retellings of the Arthuriad? How do you think this story continues to speak to our present age? 

MG: Every retelling has to be faithful to the story, but every retelling is necessarily and rightly of its own time. We bring different questions, expectations, and needs to the story, and if the story is a great myth then it speaks to those questions, expectations, and needs. That's what great myth does. It's why we still tell these stories.

When T. S. Elliot wrote The Wasteland, it was because he felt the image of a land that had suddenly gone to waste spoke to him of the awful situation after the devastation of the First World War and the Spanish flu, which killed millions, and destroyed all the hopes of progress. This image of a desolate land was important to him. He's writing a poem about the anomy, disconnection, and malaise of that immediate postwar period. 

My mother first told me the story [of the wasteland], of the dolorous blow, of the utter devastation that Balin caused and how he must ride through the land and [witness it.] People curse him as he goes past, he sees the fish dead in the rivers, and he sees the crops rotting in the ground. I remember my mom telling me this story when I was about eight, and I said, “That's awful! How could there ever be a world in which one man could cause so much devastation?” And my mother said to me, “Well, we live in a world like that.” She was telling me this in the 60s. The threat of nuclear annihilation was present. She was saying, “you live in a dangerous world.” What everybody does counts for everybody else. 

So that's what it meant to me as I was growing up. But by the time I came to write my Arthuriad, I had another sense of what the wasteland (from the Arthur stories) reveals, namely,  the brutal view of the world that results from our society’s pure materialism. No longer is [our experience] full of life and beauty and love, it's just an agglomeration of stuff. It's a phenomenon we may broadly call reductivism, which is the consequence of the Enlightenment. 

We are just beginning to experience a rebellion against that. We need to re-enter the enchantment of the world. In my telling of the wasteland, I imagine what it would be like if knights who lived in the kind of world that Owen Barfield describes as original participation, for whom every wind was the Breath of God, were plunged into the modern reductive view where any truth or meaning is private and subjective, and all we see is islanded in the isolated concavity of our skulls. Supposing they went from that living participative view for a moment into our worldview, they would be utterly devastated. Of course, they would call it the wasteland. It's a parable for me now of what we lost in the Enlightenment and modernism, and how it can be restored. 

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Traces: You mentioned in a video on your YouTube channel that the Grail quest is the story of the inner life as well as outer legend. Can you speak more about that?

MG: Part of the way myth works is that the outer story helps us to articulate in a different way what's happening inside ourselves. To some degree, the quest for the Grail is an analogy for the pilgrimage of the Christian life. The Grail comes to [the knights] when they're not expecting it in the midst of a feast in Camelot. It is veiled, and they all are drawn to it in different ways. It gives them, for a moment, a wonderful experience. They all have exactly what they'd like to eat and drink, beautiful music, and the great fragrance of Heaven. They get a sense of a completely redeemed world … and then the Grail disappears. Their quest is to find the source from which this moment of blessing came.

The actual journey does not consist of banquets. There is fasting, prayer, disappointment, and false allurements to deal with, and eventually, they learn they can't get to the Grail Castle unless they pass through the wasteland. It's such an experience of devastation that they’re unsure if they’ll make it through. 

All of those things are true of the spiritual life. Anybody who's had a rapturous conversion will find their faith joyful and easy at first, until the time when they find their prayer life dry, and they experience tauntings and temptations. At that point, one’s commitment has to move from the affections to the will. The will is the deepest part of yourself, and that's what you need to give to Jesus. You go through periods of trial and temptation and difficulty, and you're sustained by that first vision and the conviction that the vision comes from somewhere else. You can't just go back to Camelot and hope that the same moment will happen again. You have to leave Camelot to eventually find the Grail, and those things are all true of the spiritual life.

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Sarah Emtage is a poet, playwright, sculptor, and library technician in Kingston Ontario. She has written two poetry books: Paperscape and The Second Rate Poetry of S. M. Emtage, a picture book called The Time Wager, a stage adaptation of The Princess and the Goblin, and a radio play series called Sound Castle. You can see more of her work at scribblore.com.

Tiessen’s latest solo exhibition Vanitas and Viriditas is an exploration of two divergent perspectives on wisdom, and how we might flourish in a modern society filled with facts but mired in confusion.

He was interviewed by Maya Venters via Zoom after the opening night of Vanitas and Viriditas in September 2024.

Maya Venters for Traces: To situate your artwork within the larger traditions of Canadian painting, can you talk about your apprenticeship under Robert Bateman and how he influenced your work?

Josh Tiessen: Robert Bateman’s artwork was among my first exposures to Canadian art and my early paintings definitely reflect his naturalistic wildlife scenes. When I was fourteen, I had my first solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of Burlington. Bateman was from the area and was a supporter of the gallery, so someone suggested I write him a letter. So I did and he wrote back inviting me to a master artist mentorship in British Columbia. There, he critiqued my painting "Nesting Trumpeter Swan," which I was very nervous about because most of the artists there were double to triple my age. 

But I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as strictly a wildlife artist early on. I was interested in old weathered architecture, and I wanted to experiment with various abstract styles. 

Eventually, I became interested in incorporating theological themes, animals, abandoned ruins, and more apocalyptic scenes. I think I gravitated to not just Bateman's idyllic landscapes, which characterize his early work in the seventies and eighties, but I really liked his latter work, like in the early two-thousands and nineties, where he started showing the encroachment of human civilizations on animal habitats. I explore more of that world in my paintings. 

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Traces: This sense of the natural world encroaching on human structures is a thread throughout Canadian painting. But any destruction or hopelessness is often depicted alongside elements of life flourishing. Your work, for example, in Nirvana 5G, uses the technocentric and apocalyptic to probe at truth and beauty. How do you use elements of decay and artificiality to gesture toward the true, beautiful, and good?

JT: Whenever my paintings depict destruction or lamentation, I try to make them beautiful through the colour palette and the handling of light and shadow. You cannot have ugliness for the sake of ugliness.

My "Streams in the Wasteland" series is where I began thinking about natural reclamation, which is now a common thread throughout my work. The Book of Isaiah was the unusual reference point for that series because there are these prophetic visions that Isaiah poetically writes about of the destruction of Babylon strongholds. There are hyenas that would inhabit the mansions, and owls and jackals taking up these places of power. 

So in some ways, it’s a reminder of the frailty of human civilization. I think that goes to the root of a lot of our ecological issues today: this notion that humankind is the controller of the environment and the sole center of value, an anthropocentric approach to the world. And so I think that while some of these paintings can be challenging for viewers to see, hopefully, they provoke a deeper thought.

Traces: You seem to have a very global perspective of the arts and the landscape. Your exhibition invokes the question of what it means to be a citizen of the world. How do you see yourself as a globally-oriented artist and as a citizen of the world, but also as someone who is rooted in a particular place?

JT: I’m affected by being a third-culture kid. I lived in Russia for the first six years of my life and travelled with my family for most of my childhood and for some of my adolescent years. I want to be globally minded. But in my latest painting series, Vanitas + Viriditas, I think more about place, and particularly, being content knowing the place where I live. 

One of the challenges with environmentalism is that we can be so aware of large-scale effects on the planet that we forget about the local concerns. I’m still learning to be rooted in where I am and not take it for granted. As I’ve grown, I've realized how unique my area of southwestern Ontario is, where I have wetlands, waterfalls, the Great Lakes, the escarpment, and the Bruce Trail right by my studio. 

Traces: At times, your paintings act as modes of preserving creation. In Agnus Dei, for example, extinct species are re-membered on headstones in the background. This painting and your use of animals call to mind the phrase “creation care,” which comes up throughout your book Vanitas + Viriditas. What does this phrase specifically mean to you?

JT: The word "creation" is important because it ties the natural world to a creator. I don’t like the term “nature.” I find it demystifies and secularizes creation, making it something outside of human experience. I think similarly with “environment;” it’s quite nebulous.

Some scholars use “earth-keeping.” I like “creation care” because it doesn’t specifically center the conversation on politics, which, unfortunately, turns people off from environmentalism. Some people think that environmentalists are just covert Marxist leftists. I think it could be a bit more disarming to people of faith who hopefully see stewardship as being something grounded within Genesis 1:26-28 about how the Garden of Eden was meant to be stewarded: we are to have dominion. That word dominion, unfortunately, can get misinterpreted, but it’s the same word attributed to Christ in the messianic psalms about servant leadership.

I think creation care for me was something I came across a little later. I'd always been a great lover of the natural world, and being with Robert Bateman inspired me to think about it artistically. But then when I went to Bible college I came across “eco-theology” and discovered that there are Christian thinkers and theologians who have argued for creation care as part of the Christian calling. 

Oftentimes, we think that the earth is something humans own, but Psalm 24 talks about how the earth and everything in it is the Lord's. If we think of God as a master artist, whom we love, we should also love the things he's created. I think this whole world, the cosmos, is a masterpiece, and humans are the crowning jewel of that masterpiece, but all of creation is imbued with wonder and glory.

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Traces: Thinking about God as the master artist, how do you see yourself as a co-creator or participant in the act of creation?

JT: J.R.R. Tolkien uses the term "sub-creator." That’s very humbling because we don’t create ex nihilo, out of nothing. We start with raw materials, and sometimes I feel that artists can be too disconnected from their materials. For instance, I’ve tried to develop a non-toxic studio where I mix my paints from raw pigments. I don’t use solvents—just walnut oil and natural mediums.

We read in Genesis about how the descendants of Cain made musical instruments and tools from forging raw materials. That’s also reflected in the creation of the tabernacle and temple. We are always working with the earth.

I try to be mindful of where my materials come from. For example, I paint on Baltic birch panels, which originate from Russia, from the Baltics. Being originally from Russia myself, it’s a neat connection for me to think about. I don’t think artistic creation needs to be at odds with creation care, with a relationship to the natural world. Artists may be some of the people most connected to the natural world. The cultivation of natural resources—and I don’t love that term—is part of the Christian mandate as well.

Traces: It’s clear that your artwork draws heavily from various theological and philosophical texts. Your exhibition emphasized the influence of Jewish wisdom literature on the current collection, and Aaron Rosen has called you an "artist bibliophile." What do you think of that category of artist?

JT: That term took me a little by surprise, but it is quite fitting. I’ve always been interdisciplinary in my work, pulling from various fields. Art history is very important to my work—history in general.

The art world can be an echo chamber, a self-referential space where we don’t always draw from other disciplines. I think the academy can be siloed in that regard. Studying art history at the University of Toronto reminded me of how art history intersects so many other disciplines, like theology and philosophy. 

I gravitate to iconographic methodologies in interpreting art. I’m interested in symbols and narratives within painting, and that became an important aspect of my work early on. My paintings reflect ideas I’m pondering and serve as a visual diary of sorts. Each work takes years to develop, as I sketch, think, and read.

But I don’t just see painting as illustrating philosophies. I think painting is its own epistemology, its own source of knowledge. It’s visual theology, and that can be missed. What we can learn about life or faith through painting is important, valid, and distinct from other ways of knowing. 

Traces: Music is another mode of knowing, in this sense. Your brother, Zac Tiessen, composed an original score to accompany the Vanitas and Viriditas exhibition. In addition to the textual influences, are there liturgical or musical influences that have also gone into this series?

JT: Yes. When putting together this series, I knew I would have the Vanitas paintings with Qohelet, inspired by Ecclesiastes, and the Viriditas paintings with Sophia. I put together two separate playlists of music for each set. For the Sophia paintings, Max Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight, a contemporary classical music piece, was an important reference point. For Qohelet, I listened to Father John Misty, John Mark McMillan, and Arcade Fire’s Everything Now, which has protest songs against technology and consumerism.

Traces: There are times when the Vanitas and Viriditas paintings feel like two distinct aesthetic projects. But in the painting In This Birch Grove, these two projects come together. The character of Sophia is met by the aesthetic world of Qohelet.

I have a personal interest in what I call a "tradition of mauve" in Canadian art history (which is also present in Russian art), where winter scenes are held together by a mauve-gray palette. The Vanitas paintings use a similar palette, working as a bridge between despair and hope the way we see in Canadian art. How do the resonances of your Canadian and Russian heritage, threads of hope and despair, and the larger themes of Vanitas and Viriditas come together in this painting?

JT: The Qohelet paintings are more monochromatic, achromatic, cool and gray. This was the first painting series where I selected a very limited colour palette for the respective paintings. In This Birch Grove draws more on those cool purples, mauves, and grays. Yet Sophia is present in it, and her dress reflects the colours in the springtime palette of greens and warm sienna tones. 

I hadn’t painted anything reflecting my Russian heritage before, so this was a first for me. Birch trees are Russia’s national tree, often seen as having magical powers and planted around Orthodox churches. Winter scenes are common in Russian Impressionism, a painting tradition that is very melancholy, as you could expect, like the realist painters of the 1800s— Ilya Repin and Ivan Kramskoy, for example.

But there’s also Nicholas Roerich, whose work is similar to the Group of Seven and Lauren Harris’s stylized forms. You get the beauty of the landscape but also its desolation. The Group of Seven was very influential to me as well.

I approach colour like an Impressionist painter. When putting together a colour setting, I start with a limited palette to set the emotional tone and mood before diving into hyper-detail.

Traces: In This Birch Grove is also a painting of encounter. Can you speak to the meeting we see between Sophia and the bear? 

JT: Initially, I wanted to reflect more on the Russian Orthodox churches in ruins and the grave markers, thinking about the Soviet era and the millions martyred, whether political dissidents or Christians or priests rounded up in the Gulag. But then, with Russia’s war in Ukraine, this painting was going to be seen in a new light because the bear has often been a symbol for Russia—the bear from the north—or in Russian fairy tales as "Misha the Bear," a beloved character.

In this painting, you see Sophia encountering this wild bear. Her gesture of peace and welcome reflects that she is Lady Wisdom; Proverbs says, “a gentle answer turns away wrath.” Unfortunately, in war and politics, we often pick sides in conflicts. With the current situation, for instance, we demonize all Russians. My parents and I have colleagues in both Russia and Ukraine, and we pray for peace. 

Interestingly, a Russian man in his twenties saw this painting on Instagram and told me it encapsulated his experience of what he was going through—showing both the beauty of Russian heritage and its destruction. The title of the piece comes from a poem by Nikolai Zabolotsky called In This Birch Grove, which expresses anguish and sorrow but also hope for a brighter day.

Traces: Seeing all these paintings together at your exhibition, there is an arc-like quality to your work. This goes back to the global perspective we talked about. In many pieces, it feels like the animals of the world are coming together, especially around the altar in Agnus Dei. How do you see your paintings as spaces between a destroyed world and a new one to come?

JT: I’ve been influenced by what’s called eco-dystopian worlds or cli-fi literature. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy has been an influence, as she’s an environmentally aware Canadian author. Her book The Year of the Flood recounts the story of the God’s Gardeners, with a lot of theological and biblical references.

Unfortunately, a lot of apocalyptic films fall short by focusing on destruction and decline for entertainment. With the “imminent frame,” as Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor calls it, there’s no transcendence or hope beyond human effort. I think hope does need to be grounded in the present world, but I want to avoid idealistic portrayals of reality while still showing hope and beauty from ashes. 

The idea of beauty from ashes comes from Isaiah 61 and has inspired much of my work. It’s about showing beauty amidst destruction and within brokenness. For instance, my painting Agnus Dei has the ruins of a cathedral reflecting the persecution of the church but also its moral compromises. The animals in the painting are calling us to moral faithfulness to God, the Creator.

In The Greening of the White Cube, where Sophia walks into an abandoned art gallery, there’s a deer that has already entered the space before her. The animals serve as signposts. One passage that inspired the Vanitas and Viriditas series is from the Book of Job, chapter twelve, which says… “But ask the animals, and they will teach you. Who among them does not know that the Lord holds the breath of every creature?” Animals have this abiding divine awareness, and that’s where I see hope, which points toward the new Eden.

Similarly, in The Peaceable Kingdom, a painting in progress at the exhibition, I’m interested in the liminal space between the fallen world and the world of new creation, instead of jumping straight to paradise or heaven. It’s very hard to paint that in a believable way. If I’m being honest, what I’m doing is portraying something I can more realistically capture with my knowledge of the broken world we’re living in.

Traces: I appreciate you mentioning the Canadian influences of Charles Taylor and Margaret Atwood. Your painting Creation Cathedral pulls directly from Emily Carr’s The Indian Church. As a contemporary Canadian painter, where does your work fit in the larger traditions of Canadian art and culture?

JT: I get interviewed by American art magazines, and they’ve never heard of the Group of Seven or Emily Carr, with some exceptions. But I would say one thing that gets overlooked in that discussion is the spiritual impetus behind a lot of Canadian works. For the Mystical Landscapes at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Dr. Rebecca Smick (Professor of Philosophy and Art at the Institute for Christian Studies) wrote in the exhibition catalogue about how the survey highlighted the presence of God within creation in modern landscape painting. Granted, the curators also referenced the influence of Theosophy, Buddhism, and other spiritual traditions, but they rightfully questioned the conventional secularist narrative.

I was thinking through how a lot of Canadian art includes Indigenous voices, as they similarly refer to animals as our brothers and sisters within creation, which I thought was quite meaningful. Emily Carr writes about seeing God in His woods, in the Tabernacle of the woods.

There’s this interesting tradition in Canadian art. Although I don’t only paint the Canadian landscape, there is a sensibility in Canadian art—an affection for the natural environment and our beautiful country. This goes back to indigenous artists like Norval Morrisseau, the Anishinaabe artist, and Kenojuak Ashevak, the Inuit artist. When post-Impressionist painters came from Europe and were exposed to Canada’s colourful landscapes—like Lawren Harris’s mountains, which have this transcendent and uplifting quality—they were inspired by the beauty. But on the other hand, we have painters like William Kurelek, who included themes of depression and existentialism. He was a man of faith, but there are a lot of winter scenes in his works where you feel the sense of a barren landscape. So, there is this interplay of beauty in the landscape but also isolation and despair. 

It is necessary for us to highlight some of these overlooked spiritual narratives and tensions, as well as the strong environmental art tradition, both of which I see myself benefitting from and hopefully being a part of. So, I do feel like I fit within that sensibility of relating to and wanting to steward our landscapes, as an individual, a Christian, and an artist.

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Maya Venters is a writer from the Canadian East Coast. Her chapbook Life Cycle of a Mayfly (Vallum Chapbook Series) won the 2023 Vallum Chapbook Prize. She is an MFA candidate at the University of St. Thomas (TX) where she received a Scanlan Fellowship. Maya has published in Rattle, The Literary Review of Canada, Modern Age, and Ekstasis, among others. She can be found at mayaventers.ca.