The Midnight Sun: A Conversation with Daniel Cowper
A Conversation between Daniel Cowper & Maya Venters
Daniel Cowper’s poetry and critical writing has appeared in numerous publications in Canada, the US, Ireland, and the UK. His poems have been collected in The God of Doors (winner of the Frog Hollow Press Chapbook contest) and Grotesque Tenderness (MQUP, 2019). His latest work is Kingdom of the Clock, a novel in verse about urban life. He is a contributing editor with New Verse Review, and lives on Bowen Island with his wife Emily and their children.
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.
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.
…when you know someone and you speak with them, you learn something about the power of the human spirit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
