Ashley-Elizabeth Best: A Planet Earth Poetry Interview

Planet Earth Poetry’s Interviews shine the spotlight on our featured poets and their new collections. This new initiative aims to pair interviewers with poets wherever possible.

Ashley-Elizabeth Best

A-E Best is a disabled poet and essayist from Kingston. Her work can be found in the Capilano Review, New Welsh Review, CV2, Ambit Magazine, Mslexia, and Chatelaine. Her work was longlisted for the 2021 CBC Poetry Prize. Her second collection, Bad Weather Mammals, is now available from ECW Press. She’s currently the Editorial Coordinator for Arc Poetry Magazine and a Marketing Assistant for Brick Books.

Interview: Christine Schrum

Christine Schrum: “This is my story, and I/ am telling it,” the persona asserts in the first poem of Bad Weather Mammals. How did this powerful collection come into being?

Ashley Elizabeth Best: That’s such a great question and I’m glad you asked! While writing my first collection I was deep in coming to terms with many changes and challenges in my life. I was living on disability support and relearning my body after surgery (and nearly dying) and life as a disabled woman. I’m not sure why I didn’t identify as disabled yet; I think I thought I wasn’t allowed to, like I was waiting on some invitation from an invisible committee, which was quite silly actually because I was living on ODSP (Ontario Disability Support Program).

What changed? The world and my life. I distanced myself from those who made me feel shame about living on disability support and began openly talking about my experiences with my body. I realized that what I needed when I started my writing journey almost 20 years ago was to have someone else write and talk about their experiences as a disabled person, to create a space where we can be vulnerable safe, and honest about our lives. My goal is to provide that space for others through deep listening and writing.

CS: I love how you use the filling out of bureaucratic forms—disability support, social services, character witness letters—as poetic form. Can you tell me a bit about this choice? 

AEB: I love hermit crab poems. The hermit crab is a species of crab that moves frequently. Every time it outgrows its shell, which is often, it moves into another container. Sometimes, it's another shellfish’s empty shell, a piece of LEGO, a tin can, or a pen cap. They are always growing and adapting to their environments. We live in a world that demands disabled folk adapt to the world with no expectation that the world will make adaptations for us.

The idea came to me while I was going through some old documents and found some of my old ODSP forms. I never felt like I had an outlet to speak back to a system that kept me in a poverty loop, all while in the guise of assisting me. Documentation like medical or government forms, is not often written by disabled folk, rather they are written about us. Medical files are compiled by our doctors and a lot of patients never see them. They are narratives created outside of us and not always for us. I have found it particularly powerful to use medical documentation and forms received from disability support programs to add a human element to vicious bureaucratic systems meant to exclude and punish the sick, poor, and disabled.

CS: In one poem, the persona imagines taking refuge in the heart of a whale. In another, she writes, “I think if the moon knew me, it would take my side.” What role does nature play in your poetry?

AEB: Nature plays a huge role! I’ve always been eco-minded and grew up (partially) in the wilds just south of Algonquin Park. My grandfather taught me a lot about respecting nature and her limits. It helped me decenter myself in the bigger context of life on this planet, and I learned a lot about respecting the boundaries of the natural world and its creatures. We have one planet, and I will only ever have one body, and I think there’s a great symmetry there.

CS: How might poems about bodies, medicine, and mental health foster important conversations—and perhaps even sociopolitical change?

AEB: Bless those who are seen and not silent. Silence and shame are such destructive forces. I have lived in silence about a lot in my life but I refuse to now. Those who are able (and safe) to be open about their experiences help to create space for not just a bigger conversation but real action and change. No one should suffer in silence, and solutions to wider systemic issues are only possible with the experiences of those living through the issues we seek to change. Through support, resistance, and persistence, I truly believe we can create actionable goals and change.

CS: What’s next on the horizon for you as a poet?

AEB: Thank you for asking! I’m currently working on a new poetry manuscript and a book of essays. Three years ago, my partner and I became the victims of gun violence; our vehicle was struck by bullets while parked at our apartment complex and my partner was shot. Both books are about the shooting in different ways. The essays use the lens of the shooting to examine a lifetime of trauma and familial dysfunction (CPTSD) while the poetry book examines our concepts of home and finding joy after life-altering trauma.

In the immediate future, I’m very happy to be touring Bad Weather Mammals and spending time with my baby nephew.

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Christine Schrum’s essays and articles about the environment, relationships, and chronic illness have appeared in Smithsonian, The Atlantic, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Rumpus, Grain, and other publications. Her poetry has been published in journals like CV2 and EVENT, and anthologies including Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (2022, Caitlin Press). The recipient of a 2021 Canada Council of the Arts grant, she is working on a memoir about coming of age in the Transcendental Meditation movement.

Kim Trainor: A Planet Earth Poetry Interview

Planet Earth Poetry’s Interviews shine the spotlight on our featured poets and their new collections. This new initiative is starting small and aims to pair interviewers with poets wherever possible.

Kim Trainor

Kim Trainor is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Ledi was a finalist for the 2019 Raymond Souster Award. A blueprint for survival appeared with Guernica Editions in Spring 2024.

Interview by Anna Cavouras

Anna Cavouras: What calls you to use poetry to talk about climate collapse? 

Kim Trainor: I guess we use the tools that are to hand. For me, those tools are poetry, poetry films, and, when I’m in a teaching semester, my classes. When it comes to poetry, my poetry documents my life and it is inevitable then to include everything this encompasses, including climate collapse, the sixth mass extinction, the breaching of planetary boundaries, and so on. But such massive damage might be refracted in a poem in the smallest ways—a recollection of how caterpillars used to be everywhere as a child; snowdrops blooming earlier each year, finding new phrases suddenly come effortlessly to the tongue, like ‘atmospheric river’ or ‘polar vortex’ or ‘heat dome.’

AC: Poetry exceeds words in this collection. How would you describe the role that other mediums, (tech drawings, emails, sketches), play in this collection? 

KT: There are a lot of mediums in my book—Gmails, a blueprint drawing for the Svalbard seedbank, sketches of chloroplasts, a child’s drawing of a monster, a photograph I took of a bumblebee, fuzzed with pollen. I’ve always been interested in how lyric poetry might move beyond traditional collections, without sacrificing the intimacy, emotionality, and music of the lyric. So I’m borrowing techniques from documentary poetry, constraints, data, prose-poems, collage but still trying to stay true to my roots.

The first section of A blueprint for survival is traditionally lyric, while the second section, called “Seeds,” is where the various mediums appear, often embedded within a diary format—excerpts from news articles, IG posts, etc. These diary entries run along the bottom of every page in the second half of the book, while the ‘seeds’ or poems appear above; the 2-part division could be thought of as soil with offshoots; mycelia with trees: the seeds of poems draw sustenance from this fertile soil. The diary documents the process of writing poetry and illustrates how what happens in daily life is what gives rise to individual poems. The photographs and diagrams are part of this documentary aspect, and I also wanted to visually depict multivocality and the kind of sympoiesis or co-making that I think we need to be aware of moving forward.

As humans we have evolved to become an apex super-species that predates on every other living being while strip-mining the planet. We need to learn how to co-exist, live with less, care more, understand that all organisms are in a process of world-making.

AC: In the second part of the collection, “Seeds”, you describe the examples (lentil, tardigrade, snowdrop, etc.) as “blueprints”.  They feel like really thoughtful choices. I would love to know more about the process of choosing these specific examples over others. and how these examples strengthen the collection. 

KT: At the back of my mind was a comment made by James Lovelock in his Revenge of Gaia (2006), which I paraphrase in A blueprint for survival in the “Codex” seed: “James Lovelock …called for the creation of a simple book, a primer that survivors of an existential global event might use to rebuild a more peaceful, hopefully more sustainable, world. It would contain basic hard-won knowledge—of elements and microbes, of atoms and childbirth, of hygiene and crucial medicines, of how to collect and sow seeds. He suggested it should be printed on acid-free pages, in colour-fast ink, collected in a well-stitched codex and written in a language so beautiful that every home would have one on the shelf so that its ubiquity might guarantee its survival.” I was thinking more expansively in “Seeds”—how not just scientific knowledge might serve in aiding survival (not only human but survival of all species), or how such a codex might assist, but also how other organisms have found ways of world-making and adapting.

For “Hymenoptera (honeybee, bumblebee, Vespa orientalis)” I was intrigued by Robert Bringhurst’s reference to the Vespa orientalis in his essay in Learning to Die (2018); this wasp has learned to harvest energy directly from sunlight; its cuticle is formed of yellow xanthopterin and brown melanin, both of which absorb light.

“Tardigrade” was inspired by a news article on the Israeli Beresheet rocket (named after the opening word of Genesis in the Hebrew bible, ‘In the beginning’). It crash-landed on the moon with a payload that included what was described as an archive of curated human knowledge etched by lasers onto 25 stacked nickel discs, some of which could be read by the human eye, others only by microscope or magnifying glass. The archive comprised the entire English Wikipedia and a wearable Rosetta disc, a primer to the world’s languages. The nickel discs could resist oxidization, wouldn’t degrade, were immune to microbes, chemical erosion, and extreme cold. The library was meant to be a “backup for humanity,” and, if it survived the crash landing on the moon, might have a shelf life of 10,000 years or more; several billion in the vacuum of space. The payload also included a handful of tardigrades in their dormant tun state, in which they are virtually indestructible, even in the void of space. They seem like a remarkable and cheeky species, in the face of venture capitalists and human hubris. There’s a little story behind each seed but those are some examples.

AC: On page 140, you discuss the idea of attention as a “moral act”—what role do you see poets have in this attention? What role does A blueprint for survival play?  

KT: The botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, in Gathering Moss, 2003, describes attention as a form of intimacy—a receptiveness to learning, to hearing stories and perspectives of others, other organisms, other kin, the land—in her case, the mosses. She describes listening to the quiet voices of mosses.

From a western philosophical perspective, informed by cognitive science, Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and His Emissary (2009) describes how the two hemispheres of the brain have radically different styles of attention. He argues that the right hemisphere allows for sustained attention and vigilance, an openness to the new, to the other who is not yet known, is not me. The left hemisphere is focused, pinpoint, selective, recirculating and categorizing information: it takes what has been learned by the right hemisphere, what is not already known and sorts and analyzes it. According to his thesis, right hemispheric expansion is more prominent in humans, and is associated with empathy, with “imagination, creativity, the capacity for religious awe, music, dance, poetry, art, love of nature, a moral sense, a sense of humour, and the ability to change our minds.”

Most significantly, McGilchrist argues that each hemisphere’s different style of interacting with the world to some extent constrains or determines our world: “the type of attention we pay determines what it is we see.” The right hemispheric forms of broadband attention—alert, vigilant, sustained, open to new possibilities, sights, and sounds—are crucial to long-term survival. They are what he calls the “ground of our being in the world.”

I think that not only does this form of attention provide a model for the poet, but the elements associated with right hemisphere styles of attention provide the key tools a poet works with: the formation of new and unexpected connections that happens with analogy and metaphor; attunement to emotional response; the music and complex rhythm of words; insight; and very often, although not always, significant attention to and empathy for the Other. How does the poem create an opening which simultaneously helps to gather our sustained attention, allowing the world to enter in, that which is new or other or unknown, while still respecting the inherent darkness of the other within its own rich interior life?

AC: I will ask what you ask in the poem “Paper Birch”—“Tell me where do we go from here?” For you as a writer and as an activist?

KT: I’m an eternal optimist. As a poet and teacher, a lot of my work is cultural. As a writer, I keep writing. As a lecturer, I keep teaching—my classes focus on climate change, ecology, poetry in relation to the natural world entwined in the cultural realm. I donate to local environmental groups. I sign petitions. I grow local flora for the bees. I’d like to do some volunteering at Unist’ot’en. I’d like to help when the next call comes to be on the ground to protect the old growth forests. We don’t know what the future holds.

AC: Finally, what are you up to next? 

KT: I’m currently at work on two projects. One is a book of ecopoetics called Blue thinks itself within me: Lyric poetry, ecology, and lichenous form. It’s forthcoming with Oskana Poetry and Poetics (University of Regina Press) in 2026. I’m in the final stages of revision.

And I’m just beginning to collect ideas for a long poem, which will be based on oldgrowth specklebelly lichen and the time I spent in the fall of 2021 onwards at Ada’itsx / Fairy Creek. I’m inspired by the work of the sculptor Nathalie Miebach, who translates meteorological data into woven sculptures where each detail represents a data point; she works on creating relatable narratives from what might seem like incomprehensible data. From a technical perspective, I’m thinking about how citizen-scientist data might be woven into a long poem.

Kim Trainor

is the granddaughter of an Irish banjo player and a Polish faller who worked in logging camps around Port Alberni in the 1930s. Her earlier books are Karyotype (Brick Books, 2015), Ledi (Book*hug, 2018), shortlisted for the Raymond Souster award, and A thin fire runs through me (icehouse poetry / Goose Lane Editions, 2023). Her poems have appeared in Anthropocenes (AHIP), Ecocene, ISLE, Ecozon@, Dark Mountain (UK) and Fire Season I and II (Vancouver). Her poetry films have screened at Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Berlin) and at +the Institute [for experimental art] (Athens), as well as in Dublin and Seattle. Her current project is “walk quietly / ts’ekw’unshun kws qututhun,” a guided walk at Hwlhits’um (Canoe Pass) in Delta, BC, featuring contributions from artists, scientists, and Hwlitsum and Cowichan knowledge holders.

A blueprint for survival (Guernica Editions, 2024) begins in wildfire season, charting a long-distance relationship against the increasing urgency of climate change in the boreal, then shifts to a long sequence, “Seeds,” which thinks about forms of resistance, survival, and emergence in the context of the sixth mass extinction. Each seed functions as blueprint, each showing a different way of being in the world: lentil, snowdrop, chinook salmon, codex, tardigrade, honeybee, “the beautiful cell.”

(Interviewer) Anna Cavouras has published poetry with the Mississauga Writers Group and The League of Canadian Poets and in various anthologies. In 2022, Anna was long-listed for the Surrey Muse Awards for creative nonfiction and short-listed with the Federation of BC Writers contest in creative nonfiction. Her non-fiction work has also appeared in Studio Magazine of Art and Design and Boneyard Soup Horror Magazine. She is currently a book reviewer with the Fat Joy podcast and an editorial assistant with Minerva Rising Press. She is the inaugral Assistant to the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry.