Anne Simpson on writing and the life of a poet

Anne Simpson is one of Antigonish’s most quietly remarkable residents; — novelist, poet, visual artist, essayist, community builder. Perhaps not unexcepted for a poet, she thinks carefully before answering Anuj and Justin’s questions resulting in eloquent answers with nuggets of wisdom for anyone considering a career in writing or as an artist.

How It Started: Logistics

Simpson trained as a visual artist, went to art school after university, and assumed for a long time that painting was her future. Then she had children, and large canvases revealed themselves to be deeply impractical when chasing after toddlers. Poetry, on the other hand, is portable. You can write a poem during nap time.

Apples and Oranges

For Simpson, poetry and prose fiction are not the same skill in other forms. They are genuinely different beasts—an apple and an orange—and crossing between them is not as natural as people assume. Poets, it’s often said, can’t write stories. They fall off a cliff when the plot is supposed to start.

What poetry can do, though, is teach you things about language that quietly reshape everything else you write. If a character is frightened in a novel, Simpson might let the sentence run on, the wild syntax itself evoking the fear. That technique doesn’t come from fiction. It comes from years of learning how a line works through poetry. The experiments in one form find their way into the other, whether you intend them to or not.

Her novels, she’s clear, don’t begin from poems. She has no idea where they come from. They arrive, consume you, and then you spend a decade trying to build the world they’ve dragged you into — remembering whether the character has grey eyes or brown ones, keeping the object that was on the table in chapter three still on the table in chapter seven.

What Discipline Actually Looks Like

So how do you turn creative energy into a finished book? Simpson’s answer is reassuringly practical. She’s her own first editor, but she brings in an outside editor about halfway through a manuscript — someone who can look at the whole shape of the thing and say: this is working, these ten pages aren’t, the ending is still eluding you. A perennial problem for writers: beginnings get revised until they’re nearly worn through; endings remain elusive to the last.

Simpson tells the story of an interviewer who once pressed David Bowie on his apparent lack of discipline. Bowie’s response: I have a project in mind, and I will see it through. Simpson holds onto that. The job is to keep going even when, especially when, you feel like you’re failing. The feeling of failure, she’s found, is almost always what arrives just before something rises up into something real.

How She Got Here

Simpson came to Antigonish because her husband got a job at StFX. She didn’t choose it; for a while, she resisted it. She arrived as the so-called wife of a university professor, which came with certain unspoken assumptions about what she would and wouldn’t be. There’s a quiet flash of something when she describes it. The desire to prove those assumptions wrong, she admits, may have had something to do with what came next.

What actually unlocked her writing life was almost accidental. She read a piece about a woman in New Hampshire who had simply turned off the television and focused. Simpson took that literally. Cut the distractions. Write. She sent out poems and short stories by mail—actual envelopes, actual stamps—and when they came back rejected, a mentor told her to send them out again the same day. She did. And so a writing career was slowly built resulting in Simpson wining the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2004.

These days it appears as Antigonish itself has seeped into nearly everything she’s made. Pomquet Beach appears at the end of Speechless. The landscape around Antigonish grounds her poetry. The paintings she made for years were of places nearby.

The New Novel: Marie-Henriette

These days, Simpson is working on a historical novel that she is close to finishing, set in eighteenth-century Cape Breton. She found her subject the way she finds most things: by following a small, specific curiosity. She opened a book about notable Nova Scotian women, looking for someone who might interest her, and found Marie-Henriette LeJeune on the page. The instant attraction is still visible in how she talks about her now, more than six years later.

Marie-Henriette was born in France in 1764, the child of Acadian parents deported during the expulsions who tried three times to return to Nova Scotia before the British permitted them to stay. She would eventually become Marie-Henriette LeJeune Como Ross, but the novel deals only with the years when she was twenty-four to twenty-six, before her marriage to James Ross. She was a midwife, which in her era conferred an unusual freedom: midwives could go where they needed to go, enter any household, cross boundaries that other women couldn’t.

What’s known about her is fragmentary and occasionally vivid. She helped contain a smallpox epidemic near what is now Sydney. She may have had contact with Joseph DesBarres, the lieutenant governor of Cape Breton when it was briefly its own colony. There are stories—possibly apocryphal—that she once fought off a bear in the woods.

Simpson has taken what’s known and met the rest of it halfway. She invented a smallpox outbreak near La Rochelle in France, where Marie-Henriette would have lived before her family’s return, to explain how a young Acadian woman came to know enough to quarantine the sick from the healthy and attempt variolation — the crude precursor to vaccination known in Europe at the time. She gave her a mother and an aunt who taught her. She gave her enemies too: people who blamed her for the sickness rather than crediting her for fighting it. Simpson says she was thinking about nurses in Kentucky being blamed during COVID.

The Community Side

Simpson helped establish what is now StFX’s Academic Success Centre. For Simpson, Antigonish is a place where you want to try things to strengthen the community; where you find yourself looking around thinking: if we partnered with that organization, maybe this would work. Asked whether it’s true that Antigonish punches above its weight in the arts, she says yes without hesitation.

Where to Start

For anyone who wants to find Anne Simpson’s work, she suggests the novels as the easier entry point: Falling, about daredevils and Niagara Falls, or Speechless, about a Nova Scotian journalist who finds herself in the middle of a controversy in Nigeria — a country Simpson spent two years in as a volunteer before, many years later, writing about it in fiction. Both are available through the Curious Cat or the town library. Start with the novels, she suggests and the poetry is where you’ll end up eventually.

Her advice to anyone thinking about writing, or any newcomer looking for a creative foothold in a new place: everyone has a unique voice, and the world doesn’t know it until it’s put out there. It doesn’t have to be a book. It could be theatre, or teaching, or something visual. But the voice needs to go somewhere.

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