The incomparable Catherine Owen is our guest for this Power Q & A, and we are honoured to welcome her. Catherine is a vital member of the CanLit community and she has published 16 collections in four genres. Today, we wanted to ask Catherine about her upcoming poetry collection, Moving to Delilah, (Freehand Books, April 1, 2024). Having been on 12 cross-Canada book tours, she’s chosen a distinctly different approach to launching this most recent collection, hosting salon-like in-home performances and discussions. We were fascinated and we had to ask: why?
Q: We are intrigued by your approach to introducing your new book, Moving to Delilah, to readers. We are wondering if you’d tell us more about the book, and the reasoning behind these intimate and interactive gatherings?
Moving to Delilah by Catherine Owen.
A: Moving to Delilah is a collection of poems about a Westcoaster buying and inhabiting a 1905 house in Edmonton, AB from 2018 to the present. The book is in three sections: Home, Garden, and Neighbourhood, each representing the challenges and joys of renovations, growing things, relationships and re-learning the parameters of space and place in an entirely alternate environment. The thematic undercurrent is the realities of economic itinerancy so many face in Canada now and the impossible housing market that has undoubtedly redefined notions of home. Having been on national tours for most of my books, I aim to shift my performative style and my approach to undertaking workshops with each one. Now, I've realized what I value most about being on tour is the chance not only to do readings but to gather with other artists in informal settings to read and discuss poetry and undertake material explorations that spur us to new ways of thinking and feeling, in this case, about the themes and forms of house and home. As Stephen Dunn reminds us, the usual "prompt-based" method behind workshopping can "regularize what should be rarified." With Moving to Delilah, I want to dance around the subject with those individuals who care to participate: drawing, assembling, resonating and articulating and leave the choreography of the poem itself to the later "rooms of their own."
Catherine herself!
More about Catherine Owen:
Catherine Owen is a Vancouver writer who now lives in Edmonton in a 1905 house where she edits, hosts the performance series 94th Street Trobairitz, reviews, and runs the podcast Ms Lyric's Poetry Outlaws. She's published 16 collections in 4 genres, including her latest, Riven (ECW 2020) and her next Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024). She's been on 12 cross-Canada book tours, played bass in metal bands and worked in the BC film industry in the Props department.
More about Moving to Delilah:
In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.
Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.
In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic forms.