Susan Musgrave: The Poet

Writer and poet Susan Musgrave’s life is a far cry from the mundane. In fact, she says her role as a “social misfit” started early in life, when she was kicked out of her kindergarten class for laughing.

Susan’s love of putting words to paper also started early and by Grade 8, she had already won her first poetry competition with a piece about Jackie Kennedy visiting her husband’s grave by moonlight. Not long after, Susan dropped out of school and ran away from home to gain life experience, before being committed to a Victoria hospital psych ward. It was while in the hospital that renowned UK poet Robin Skelton dropped by for a visit after reading her poetry. He declared, “You’re not mad, you’re a poet.” At age 19, Susan’s first book of poetry, Songs of the Sea Witch, was published.

In 1969, Susan received a Canada Council Grant of $1,500 and spent the next two years living on the remote west coast of Ireland.

“I feel nostalgic about my time in Ireland,” she says. “I’ve gone back there just about every year since I left. I feel at home when I’m there. But my family is in British Columbia and four generations of roots. I suspect if I moved to Ireland, I would pine away for the west coast of BC, and particularly for Haida Gwaii. So best just to visit Ireland, for the nonce.”

When Susan returned to Canada in 1972, it was to Haida Gwaii, where she spent the next few years until she married a criminal defense lawyer. Then, in the courtroom in 1981, when her husband was defending five Americans and 23 Colombians for smuggling 30 tonnes of marijuana into Canada, Susan says she fell in love, from across the courtroom, with one of the accused smugglers. He was acquitted, and she left with him for Mexico, then lived in Colombia and Panama for two years, until her first daughter was born.

When Susan returned to Canada, she became a writer-in-residence at the University of Waterloo. It was there that her next love story began, when she received a manuscript from convicted bank robber, Stephen Reid, who was serving a 20-year sentence at Millhaven Penitentiary.

“I read the manuscript, fell in love with the protagonist, and married the author in 1986, when he was still in prison,” she says. “His novel, Jackrabbit Parole, was released the same year.”

After Stephen was granted parole in 1987, the couple moved to Vancouver Island. A few years later, they began building their house on Haida Gwaii, and were featured as The Poet and the Bandit on CBC’s Life & Times, which aired in January 1999. Just six months later, Stephen was arrested again for a Victoria bank robbery.

Susan has often found herself in the media and has even been described as eccentric.

“I was once asked to be on a television show featuring ‘eccentrics.’ I figure, if I’m lucky, that’s a label I will have earned by the time I’m well over 110, so I insisted I wasn’t the right person for the show. The other two guests were a man from Newfoundland who cured hiccups by lighting his nightgown on fire, and a yogi from Manitoba who ate a car over a period of 10 years. What had I done, in comparison? Married a bank robber?”

Sadly, Stephen passed away in June 2018. While she grieves, Susan is working on his memoir.

“The working title for it is A Grief as Pure as This,” she says. “I have spent the last year reading books about grief, and I find most of them very helpful. Poetry of bereavement is especially good. You can count on poets not to sugar-coat anything, least of all death.”

When asked about her choice of complicated partners, Susan answers candidly, “Someone asked me recently to describe my life in two words. I said, ‘sad’ and ‘busy.’ Whose life is easy? There were elements of my life that made good copy for the press, and those parts of my life were lived out loud, as it were. I’m easily bored – I’m learning to live with that now and call it something else – like ‘quiet enough,’ which is how an Irish writer described his Christmas.”

“I’ve always been attracted to what I perceived as excitement,” Susan continues. “However, being married to an international drugs wholesaler was not very exciting – mostly sitting in vans at the sides of roads in Colombia waiting for ‘the men’ to finish their ‘negocios delicados.’”

“Being married to a bank robber who spent two-thirds of our married life behind bars wasn’t all that exciting either,” she admits. “I loved the men behind the masks, not their occupations. I loved Stephen because he could make me laugh. I feel I have lost my best laughing friend, and that makes me enormously sad. So, I keep busy.”

Despite what has or has not happened in Susan’s personal life, she has always written.

“In Panama and Colombia, it was harder to write because I wasn’t ‘at home.’ I wrote about wanting to be ‘where the vulture is only an image.’ I don’t like hot countries. Heat doesn’t help you think. I sat in an air-conditioned apartment in Panama and worked on a novel set in Duncan, British Columbia. On Haida Gwaii, I wrote a novel set in Colombia. When my daughters were young, I kept writing. I had to. It was (and is) my livelihood.”

“My literary work is affected by everything I do, and some of what I don’t. Certainly, Stephen gave me the grief I seem to thrive on. ‘Like grief, there’s never enough,’ the last line of a poem I wrote called ‘Here it Comes – Grief’s Beautiful Blow-Job.’ I am still not sure I agree with that line. How can there never be enough grief?”

Throughout the years, Susan has published prolifically – not just poetry, but also fiction, non-fiction, children’s books and a cookbook called A Taste of Haida Gwaii: Food Gathering and Feasting at the Edge of the World.

“I like to call my cookbook a ‘love story with recipes,’” Susan says. “It’s definitely my bestselling book. That and the board books Orca publishes for the 0-2 set. My latest is called My Love for You. I have twin granddaughters who are now nine. I wrote three board books for them, but I had written other books for children before I even had kids of my own.”

Those might be the bestsellers, but Susan admits that of her own literary works, poetry is what she loves best.

“Right now, the favourite of my poems is Rain, one of the last –maybe the last – poem I wrote before Stephen died. If you were to ask me tomorrow, or six months from now, I would probably tell you something different,” she says. “Whatever I happen to be working on is usually my favourite work. So currently my favourite work is the memoir about Stephen.”

Naturally, a poet loves to read poetry, and many different poets have influenced Susan at different stages in her life.

“Tennyson was the first poet I read because my parents had his Collected Poems in the house. Then came Bob Dylan, who, to this day, is a huge influence. One critic called me ‘the chance daughter of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg,’ so I guess the influence, in those cases, showed!”

Over the years, Susan’s own poetry style has evolved. “I used to write very skinny poems. The subject matter was elemental, too – blood, bones, earth, rain, sex and death. My lines are longer now, and I am probably less self-involved,” she admits. “I am not much interested in a self, but I haven’t yet learned how to completely slough it off.”

As for her favourite contemporary poets, Susan says the list is almost endless: Ai, Tess Gallagher, Norman Dubie, Alden Nowlan, Brian Patten, Tom Wayman, Lorna Crozier, Stephen Dobyns, Mary Oliver, Stevie Smith, Paul Durcan, Sharon Olds, Jane Hirshfield and Patrick Lane.

“I tend to read novels by Irish writers, like Colum McCann and Paul Lynch, because of the language and the black humour,” she says. “I also love novels by Jim Crace, Anthony Doerr, James Sallis, Don Winslow and Jordan Harper. I don’t read a lot of chick-lit. There’s always the afterlife, which I hear is long!”

For many of us, poetry continues to be a misunderstood art. Since 2005, Susan has taught an online poetry course through UBC’s Optional Residency in Creative Writing MFA Programme, and even her students complain that poetry is “so hard.” Her response? “Why shouldn’t it be hard? Pretty well everything worthwhile is difficult – relationships, marriage, making a good hollandaise sauce, writing a libretto. If it were easy, what would be the point, ultimately? Nothing I know is easy. From the moment I try to get out of bed in the morning, it is all hard,” she says half-joking.

Susan also runs a guesthouse called Copper Beech House at her home in Masset, Haida Gwaii, the perfect place to delight in her love of cooking and food gathering.

“For example, this May, when the spruce tips were out, I made a batch of spruce tip vodka and Elderflower syrup,” she says. “After that, it was rhubarb season and, after that, sea asparagus. I like to cook vegetarian dishes, and Yotam Ottolenghi’s cookbooks are my favourite. Middle eastern cooking is a challenge where I live – I have to buy most of the ingredients online or in Vancouver or Victoria.”

“I’m not a huge fan of seafood (having grown up on the coast),” Susan continues, “although I have learned from my friend Bob Fraumeni (who operates the Finest at Sea Seafood Shop) that if fish is fresh, it is a different kettle of fish.”

Susan also takes time to slow down and smell the roses.

“I read, watch Netflix series and take naps with my cat. I cook meals for friends, make four loaves of sourdough bread every other day (for the guesthouse) and go agate picking on Rose Spit. I sit back and watch the river flow.”

SIDEBAR

If you were to meet your 20-year old self, what advice would you give her?
“Die first. If you fall in love and live with another human being, die first. The alternative is too painful.”

What or who has influenced you the most and why?
“‘I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.’” –Hunter S. Thompson

What are you most grateful for?
“Grateful tends not to be a word I use in my vocabulary. We cheapen and diminish real gratitude by relegating it to bumper sticker status. Am I generally grateful? Yes, I am. I am grateful that I still love writing books, and that other people write books – grateful I have eyes so I can read every day and night. I am grateful for the north-westerly wind that blows on Haida Gwaii; I am grateful for having two legs that can still walk me to the beach and back. I have a house, two daughters and two granddaughters whom I love and who love me. I travel to Ireland once a year. I have clothes, food in the fridge; I don’t live in Syria and I am not a refugee. But I am not grateful that when the north-westerly blows where it will, and I hear it, some nights I am lonely as f*%@. I am not grateful for feeling like there has been way too much loss and not enough pleasure for, oh, I don’t, maybe my whole life? I am not grateful that my last love, Stephen, died a year ago June 12th, and May 26th, my first love, Robert Garfat (from Grade 7), died.”

What does success mean to you?
“When your banana cream pie doesn’t fail and doesn’t have to be eaten with a spoon.”

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