#4: Interview with Kevin Spenst
"Because the solo creative genius is an outdated model from the days of individualism, which rested on assumptions of human exceptionalism. We need each other."
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Today's interview is with brilliant multi-hyphenate (poet, writer, artist, actor, creator) Kevin Spenst. I first became familiar with Kevin when we did a Zoom reading together for PULPLiterature and I heard his ingenious poem , "BigGermanDialectWordClankinglyInsertedHere!".
Kevin has an online course called Poetry 2, which he has taught since 2021, through The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University. He was a Poetry Mentor in 2022 and is going to be a Poetry Mentor again in January 2025.
As a former Alumna of The Writer’s Studio, I cannot say enough good things about it! Read more about The Writer's Studio here.
Who are you and how do you express your creativity? What keeps you coming back to creative work? Why is it worth doing?
My name is Kevin Spenst and I’m a straight, white male. I’ve lived the majority of my adult life in Vancouver. I’m principally a poet, though I grew up drawing, acting, making things and writing. While I journal every morning to clear the way for creative work (poetry and personal/lyric essays), I still dabble in other art forms such as painting, drawing, video-making and singing. My home (a bachelor in a 1931 building in the West End of Vancouver) is my testing ground for many of these explorations.
For one of the video-poems I helped create this past summer, I made a video, Bedchamber Kingdoms (sung maybe in F), that I then projected onto a round mirror which I aimed at the corner of my living room. I think it made for something strange and hopefully analogous to the uniqueness of a poetry event that I was promoting, a reading I did with Onjana Yawnghwe and Sheri-D Wilson at the Shadbolt Centre in Burnaby. I also played with audio files of Onjana and Sheri-D reading from their poems to create the audio for our video-poem.
Another video-poem I made this summer was in collaboration with the musician Julian La Brooy. Once again, I made a video on my phone (using iMovie, Canva and Instagram) that I then projected onto one of the corners of my apartment. I sang an erasure version of one of the poems in my latest book A Bouquet Brought Back from Space that Julian had added piano to:
One of the layers of collaboration in A Bouquet Brought Back From Space is that it has cover art from Shannon Pawliw, an artist who also has a gallery in the Sun Wah building in Vancouver’s Chinatown. Shannon hosted a short-lived chapbook reading series that I ran through the latter part of the pandemic. One of the readers was Marc Perez and this past year Marc had his first full length book come out with Brick Books. We did a number of readings together in the Lower Mainland and Victoria, which all started with a slow bike ride along the False Creek seawall where we approached strangers and read our poetry to them. Marc and I also cycled to Victoria where we did a reading at Planet Earth Poetry and the day after we led a poetry crawl through art galleries where we gave people prompts based on the art.
A Bouquet Brought Back from Space was the launchpad for all these DIY adventures. I had worked on most of the poems in the collection from about 2020 onwards. They are pandemic poems, break up poems, finding love poems and dealing with the weight of a post-Mennonite backdrop to my early years poems. There are poems about growing up with a schizophrenic and unpredictable father who died when I had just become a young adult. While I grew up playing like any child, religion and aspects of my homelife brought a certain heaviness to the world. Perhaps, in writing poetry and in collaborative play with others I’m still trying to shake off some of that past and make way for clarity.
What legacy do you hope to leave with your art?
I don’t think in terms of legacy (I’m more day to day, with the occasional stretch into month to month or year to year) but I hope my poetry and the creative practices around it have made space for others spiritually, socially and politically.
What are your biggest challenges when it comes to maintaining a steady creative practice, and how have you overcome them?
This past summer I was laid up with a painful condition that was unexplained by doctors. After four trips to emergency and many weeks spent on the couch, when I started feeling better, I immediately started writing everything down in the form of personal essays. Working in different forms has allowed me to fit my writing into whatever time and energy I have. The explicitness of prose has helped me come to terms with six weeks of discomfort and pain. One of my prose manuscripts combines lyric essays that I wrote for my MA in English Literature at Simon Fraser University with these more recent personal essays.
Working on many creative fronts allows me to progress on one while I might be feeling stagnant on another. I’m still learning to accept exhaustion as something that happens.
Rest is certainly important. Above all, I’m always trying to make time to read more. Quite often, if I have the right book in my hands that’s all I need as a creative spark (right now I’m reading Terrance Hayes’ So To Speak and I’m rereading Jess Housty’s Crushed Wild Mint, D.S Stymeist’s Cluster Flux and Patrick Grace’s Deviant.)
This morning I read some of Don Domanski’s “Poetry and the Sacred”: “Poetry asks that we reshape ourselves and in that reshaping discover the sacredness of what surrounds us.” I read some of the essay, cleaned my windows and then wrote a poem. Living the ordinary and reading the extraordinary help me overcome challenges.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to start or maintain their creative practice in a new way?
Live in a new way. Write in a new way (with your non-dominant hand.) Write in a new place (a coffee shop instead of a library or vice versa or just outside in a park.) Imagine yourself as something new. Take workshops, enrol in new courses. Go to one of the many free small art galleries. Volunteer with a writing organisation or festival. (Heart of the City in Vancouver) Take up mudlarking (I think of Ariel Gordon in Winnipeg), beekeeping (here I think of Susan Cormier), buy a house in Edmonton (Catherine Owen’s latest book of poetry is about her experiences in home ownership), or collaborate with musicians (Brandon Wint is the first person to come to mind on that front.)
Why does mentorship/ community support matter?
Answer 1 - Rant!
Because we can’t do it on our own. Because the solo creative genius is an outdated model from the days of individualism, which rested on assumptions of human exceptionalism. We need each other. Humans need humans and non-humans for all sorts of things. The 20th century economies have left people feeling isolated and alone and since art is social we need communities to help foster our creative spirits. That support is localized in the people around you.
Answer 2 - Subdued
I was part of a film collective in the late 90s, which helped me gain confidence in committing to my ideas and voice. For decades, I’d wanted to be a writer but I didn’t do the necessary groundwork of sitting down and writing everyday. When I started conceiving, writing, improvising and acting in short films with a group of like-minded weirdos (I write with the greatest of affection), I gained a world of confidence. After working with the members of the Narcoleptic Videographer (yes, that was our name) and getting to know the artists, musicians and actors who frequented the Blinding Light Cinema, which was where we showed our short films from 1998 to 2003, I was able to get serious about writing. A friend set up a website for me in 2003 and I wrote a flash fiction everyday for almost four years.
It was going to UBC to do my MFA in Creative Writing where the next phase of community came into my life, but I also attended Writer’s Studio events at and around SFU. Both writing communities have been important for me as places where there is a long-term commitment to fostering writers, relationships and writing communities. I also started attending the Dead Poets Reading Series, where I learned about poets from around the world.
Community takes so many forms (I also think of something from a newsletter from Mandy Len Catron, written during the pandemic, about the different social spheres that make up our lives, from the hello we might say to someone we pass in our neighbourhood once a week to more intimate relationships.It’s all a webwork of we’s.
Do you have a mentor? If yes, who is your mentor? Are there other support structures or community that have helped you?
When I did my MFA at UBC, I was lucky enough to work with Rhea Tregebov, who was my thesis advisor and mentor. I had been writing mostly prose before I got into the program and my poetry was somewhat… rough-hewn. She’s kind and brilliant and guided me through the basics of craft. She also helped me get access to my father’s medical records from Riverview, which became the basis of my thesis, and subsequently the book Ignite.
Since graduating, I’ve met with Rhea for coffee to talk about the poetry life or seen her at her home where she’s hosted events for former students. Her mentor was Bronwen Wallace, who was committed to the writing life and community. Rhea carries that forward and I look up to her as a role model.
I also went to the Sage Hill Writing retreat where I worked with Don McKay and Ken Babstock, both of whom helped me develop further in my thinking about poetry. Also, I have read and reread Betsy Warland’s Breathing the Page and while I’ve never attended the Writer’s Studio, I have been teaching through TWS (and used Betsy’s book) for almost four years now. Her sense of writing as a sacred space (shared with that quote I added earlier from Don Domanski) is a vision that sustains me.
I have an online course called Poetry 2 through the Writer’s Studio. I’ve been teaching it since 2021. I was also fortunate enough to be the Poetry Mentor in 2022 and I’m going to be the Poetry Mentor again in 2025 (starting in January.)
Who is your dream mentor, living or dead, and why?
I haven’t travelled a lot outside of my literary life these past twenty years. I’ve put my money into workshops, retreats and the time needed to write and collaborate. One of the best experiences in the past couple of years was working with Karen Solie, first as part of an online workshop hosted through Flying Books and then I continued working with her through Banff (online because of the pandemic.) I think she’s one of our finest poets and it was wonderful working with her and seeing also how she teaches. I learned a tremendous amount from her as a writer and educator. She thinks with the entirety of her being (and writes poetry out of that fullness as well.)
From Rhea Tregebov to Don McKay and Ken Babstock at Sage Hill to Karen Solie (and numerous workshops with Betsy Warland, Saul Williams through the Verses Festival, Jericho Brown through the Joy Kogawa House and an online course with Liz Howard), I’ve been blessed with an abundance of formidable teachers. That learning has continued this summer doing readings for a book tour around B.C. with Rob Taylor, Marc Perez, Sheri-D Wilson, Onjana Yawnghwe, Cathy Stonehouse, Barbara Black, Pat Dobie, andrea bennett and others.
On this count, I don’t need to dream.
(Interview answers received via email September 11, 2024)