Author Q&A with Joelle Barron
Get to know Joelle Barron, author of Excerpts from a Burned Letter, a collection of poems which Ivan Coyote says "will enter you through your eyes, your throat, on the wind, and make its way into your chest, where these words in this order will break your heart and then, when you exhale, leave you longing for your next breath of it.”
Is there a sense, memory or feeling that embodies your book?
I’d like to think there’s a sense of lusciousness. The feeling of meeting someone and connecting over the bizarre similarities of your lives. A memory that is an isn’t your own.
Get to know Joelle Barron, author of Excerpts From a Burned Letter, a collectio of poems which Ivan Coyote says "will enter you through your eyes, your throat, on the wind, and make its way into your chest, where these words in this order will break your heart, and then, when you exhale, leave you longing for your next breath of it."
From where did you write the majority of your book?
My bed. It’s been a habit of mine to write in bed for years. When I started writing this book, my daughter was six, and still an early riser. My only opportunity to write was before she woke up, so I would set an alarm and just blearily grab my laptop and try to get something down.
What books did you turn to while writing?
Whenever I feel like I don’t know how to write anymore, I read “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson. I read and re-read Adèle Barclay’s Renaissance Normcore, Ellie Sawatzky’s None of This Belongs to Me; too much brilliant poetry to name. As research for a long poem, I read Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy by Judith Brown.
What lives on your writing desk?
My daughter’s art projects (despite her having her own desk). An excuse to write in bed.
If your book were a meal, what would it be?
Winter oranges.
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Excerpts from a Burned Letter places the experiences of historical figures and fictional characters in modern contexts—and makes their queerness explicit. This collection highlights the circular nature of time, demonstrating how even in a post-marriage-equality world, queer experiences and queer histories still face erasure.
From the perspective of a single, modern speaker, each poem is haunted by a fictional or historical queer couple, connecting ancestors to their descendants and underlining the ancientness of being queer. The book also explores themes of religion, disability, motherhood, birth, and the experience of being a queer child. The poems zoom in and out; gross, visceral depictions of bodies and their functions stand beside poems that call out the hypocrisies of religion in both its extreme and subtle forms. These poems describe the experience of being a queer person in the present day—writing the queer history of the future.
When searching for stories of themselves in history books, queer people are often met with denial and resistance. Excerpts from a Burned Letter provides explicit acknowledgement where it didn’t exist before: You were here. You live on.
Joelle Barron is an award-winning poet and writer living and relying on the Traditional Territories of the Anishinabewaki of Treaty 3 and the Métis people (Fort Frances, ON). Their first poetry collection, Ritual Lights (icehouse poetry, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2019, they were a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ2S+ Writers. Barron’s poetry has appeared in ARC Poetry Magazine, CV2, EVENT Magazine, The New Quarterly, and many other Canadian literary publications. They live with their daughter.