Robyn Marie Butt is the organizer of Forest City Open Mic.
For her bio: Scroll to the bottom. Interviewer: Stan Burfield SB. When you contracted Lyme Disease, you were in the middle of a successful career as a playwright and author of both fiction and nonfiction, having received awards for CBC plays, served as playwright-in-residence twice, hosted two reading series and a radio show, taught creative writing and journalism, and having been published in numerous journals, with a book of short stories behind you. My sister, like you, contracted Lyme Disease, but the result for her was lifelong Chronic Fatigue Disorder, so I know the immense challenge you were faced with. Yet you managed to remain productive, even embarking on a whole new literary genre. I’m fascinated. Many other highly creative people have had to work through serious disabilities. How did your struggle play itself out? RMB. I was also at the time a salaried technical writer for a tech firm in Toronto! But that did NOT survive Lyme. The Chronic Fatigue hit around then, and decked the job. I should say here that I contracted it fourteen years ago now. I suffered it untreated & undiagnosed for 11. I am told I now technically “carry” it (the fatigue and migraines can indeed hit unexpectedly) but many of the worst neurological symptoms are history, if alas some remain forever as nerve damage. Which leads me to the poetry. Yes, I’m also a fiction & nonfiction writer and dramatist (of course those are equally amenable to poetic shaping – metrics, rhythm, imagery, emotion – so I consider them also poetic), but they’re long forms requiring sustained mental focus. Lyme carries a lot of neurological effects, including ruin of sleep, attention deficits, memory loss, brain fog, and a sort of global anxiety so astonishingly bad I considered it a form of dementia at times. Poetry can deal in those experiences, those inner states, quite naturally, without taking up too many words or seeming too paranoid or self-pitying. It can also springboard from those states fairly naturally into other topics. So poetry shaped a voice out of the liminal physical and mental terrain I’d been forced into. (It’s surely no accident so many memorable poems have been written from prison.) SB. Specifically, how did you get the idea for the four books, A Hundred Poems About Flowers? Collectively, those books represent a great amount of work and time. What propelled you through them, considering your illness? RMB. The story is told better in my Introduction to the first twenty-five. But basically, while I was infected but still undiagnosed, one day I heard a phrase or voice speak in my being. It said “A Hundred Poems About Flowers”. And I heard it, and turned it over briefly, and knowing I’d always wanted to collaborate with painters saw this as the perfect vehicle and thought – “Wow. Love that idea. – Thanks.” (I’m pretty used to visions or epiphanies like this, and while I’m very respectful of this process of divine dialogue, see it also as an everyday creative thing. It can be, for anyone.) So right then I began holding onto this huge project idea (luckily I didn’t know how huge) involving poetry, paintings, and audio. And working to make it manifest. And as you well know, an artist in the grip of a serious idea is a sort of force of Nature. Or perhaps Nature simply takes her over…. Of course equally important, there were critical production components that came about too. My old friend & brand-new Cape Breton publisher Douglas Arthur Brown of Boularderie Island Press had just assembled the resources for creating wonderful colour illustrated books; and my old friend & extraordinary Language poet Colin Smith agreed to edit the entire project. Massive support indeed. Anyhow, it’s not a lie to say that the vision for A Hundred Poems About Flowers motivated my dive into poetry right when a shorter literary form, which is also amenable to elisions and obliqueness and fragments, became what I could best handle mentally and psychologically. I was literally gifted a task that as it turned out would hold and guide me, my sense of self and my sense of meaning, through the portions of a long illness which were yet to come. Which in fact it did for the subsequent 8 years. I think after having the vision I lived in terror of failing it, which would have felt like failing God. This past January, the fourth & last volume, exhibit and audiobook, final twenty-five, happened. And all four stages of the project were hauled out of myself often with the most extreme mental effort and anguish you can imagine, during the course of Lyme Disease. So ultimately I credit the Hundred Poems About Flowers project itself, and access through friends to professional means of production, with, if not my physical survival, my psychological or soul survival. SB. I really like those poems. They typically start out with a flower, something we can all easily relate to, and from there quickly, and often unexpectedly, evolve into a somehow related comment on the human condition. And they do it so beautifully! Here’s an example from the third book. RMB. [Thanks. This is from third twenty-five, an ekphrastic poem about a work by the amazing botanical artist and actual inventor of collage, Mary Dawes Delaney, an 18th-century English gentlewoman. The lovely thing is she began and completed this body of brand-new art in her 70’s and 80’s! In the Delany poems, I was working with a longer line and really enjoying it.] Damask Rose Not much about a rose hasn't been said maybe, but you and I agree in fact there's always more. Here in this damask evocation (velvet petal named for cloth) you embellish a marker on your years of embroidered panels. Silks, satins skirt and sleeve and bodice, flowers, leaves danced minuets through your mad garlands, embellished plots that when you wore them kept the gossip flowing. This rose has seen and enjoyed it all, you say, and I hear you, human drama as examined from within the sidelines: note the spot where a leaf's been gnawed; exploratory snouts of younger buds trying too hard to usurp that wide bloom's sun. She knows the ambition of youth is daring or bristles awkwardly but the opened gold-centred evening as seen by eyes who might have seen it all really is gold, really is full of striving and fancy, really is veined but still green, fragrant and unflappable if only for the party because no eyes, when the night's over, have ever seen it all, and if the stem is subtly prickled, that's just fine - you can't embrace every rumour, nor every youngster come too early proud of scent she hasn't wafted. Effortful, youth is, and you parked in the midst full blown need do nothing to outshine its all. SB. As the new and future organizer of the newly-named Forest City Open Mic poetry series at the Mykonos Restaurant (running continuously so far for seven seasons), how do you view your role and the role of the organization in the community? RMB. Hm. First, I wanted to laugh when you cited the stuff above & called mine a “successful career”. I would’ve thought it was an “experience-rich writing life”, but Career Success in the arts is, sometimes regrettably, very much bestowed by critics or academics + the professional arts administration community, and I haven’t necessarily appealed there. What they decide to support wins attention (and money), and sometimes that’s stuff that largely fails to connect with the real needs of the mainstream, and sometimes it’s wonderful & engaging & important, and sometimes it’s just the stuff that connects because it’s all that’s been allowed to. I’ve always felt mindful of the ordinary audience, the ordinary person. ‘Who am I doing this writing thing for? Critics & academics & arts administrators & my own sense of writerly status, or for my fellow citizens and even the flora & fauna (to me, also living People) struggling in the trenches just like me? The people in Toronto, or the people in rural Oxford County and in my wonky nearest hometown of Woodstock?’ Actually I seek to educate myself like a critic, academic, & administrator; and then mindful of intellectual and critical values, I seek to write for BOTH the people in Toronto and the people in the other trenches (including myself). Of course, this disconnect need not be so wide, but in Ontario, citizens so often are ignorant of the rich depth artists’ voices can add to their everyday lives that unless the critical or administrative community points them to some art, they are living in a deprived state and don’t even know it. As a result the general imagination can become rather narrowly educated, even tacky – which is to say, our souls are starving. Which in turn seems to justify the critics & administrators in looking down on that “tacky” less-educated taste (i.e. unanswered needs) of simple citizens, and ignoring them further! This is why I love the Open Mic. It feeds souls hungry for meaning and for meaningful expression. Its opportunity? – That together with accomplished Featured Readers we can learn to elevate our Soul Vocabularies. (I’m leaving out here any discussion of the explosion of writing on the Internet - which suggests that “anybody can be a writer nowadays”. Not true. Anyone can write & publish digitally. Fewer can offer lastingly valuable writing. But I still love the democracy of the digital platform, especially for young people!) SB. The Lyme Disease was perhaps the central hurdle in both your life and your art. Looking back on it from here, what factors do you credit with helping you overcome it? RMB. So surviving well comes down to a host of factors, things I was blessed with having, and surprisingly I notice that many of them are critical to making it through the dedicated creative life, too. 1. A clear sense of life purpose. Which in my case is to write – and to write thoughtfully, usefully, and well. I just had to figure out how to keep doing that. 2. Knowing I was likely infected but quickly coming to understand that the medical climate of denial at the time meant my input was going to stay ignored & that for a while (I couldn’t know how long) I was going to remain undiagnosed. I told my body (I have respectful dialogues with my body: it works, everybody should do it): “Look, I love you, but it’s one of those times in medical history when somebody has to do time on the doctors’ learning curve. You’re going to have to hang in there. I promise I’ll do my best for you meanwhile, and eventually they’ll smarten up & we WILL get healed. But hang on with me till then.” 3. A naturally pretty good immune system – I’m lucky, I inherited robust genes. After the initial virulent infection, deeper levels & aspects of the illness were held enough in check they only piled up gradually over several years. I had time to cope with one thing before another thing landed on the plate. 4. A caring & generous family who came to understand and respect what I was going through healthwise; plus very very meaningfully, State care in terms of social assistance programs when I became unable to earn. It drives me crazy when those in no position to know speak of these programs as merely enabling the indigent and lazy. 5. The Dream Giver. Nighttime & half-waking dreams shared sustaining comforts with me during otherwise highly damaged sleep. 6. Being a lifelong exerciser. If ANYONE wants to feel better, I don’t care WHAT you have, just force yourself to exercise. 7. Longstanding meditation & spiritual practices, which it’s now understood can help hold illness to a dull roar. 8. Eating healthily but not too much (I can’t afford to anyway). 9. A sense of humour: a developed appreciation of the Divine Comedy which meant I never took my situation too seriously without eventually boring myself. 10. Although an introvert – sociability. I like people, so staying connected with others, even the little I could manage, helped keep me going. Two woman friends were godsends, as was the pastoral care of four outstanding United Church ministers. 11. I’m stubborn. I never gave up. Lyme infection itself, since it affects the brain, actually insidiously programs your brain to tell you to give up, so the stubbornness to step back and notice the disease doing my thinking for me allowed me to get mad & resist. I rejected what Carolyn Myss would call Disease as Identity. Stubbornness also ensured that lying on a couch eventually got stale. “THIS IS NOT A LIFE.” I said out loud one day. “I’M DONE.” And put the universe on notice that it was time to help me, and within weeks friends had pointed me to the Lyme specialist in Toronto who by then was knowledgeable enough & basically cured me as much as I’ll ever be cured. 12. Other writers’ books – reading when I could; or audiobooks & our superb CBC Radio (which regularly consumed is as good as a university education in the arts, & EVERY would-be writer should be tuning in) – listening when I couldn’t read. Ultimately, in the battle with Lyme I think of the Beowulf storyteller (thank you Seamus Heaney), who would say that Overcoming was my Fate. SB. What an awesome story--and life lived. Very inspiring, Robyn. Thanks. On to the future: I understand you have a new book in the works. RMB. Always. Several. Lol. By the way, thanks for this Stan, and if anyone wants to discuss anything here further, you’re very welcome to talk to me at the Mykonos Restaurant any 2nd Tues. of any month from Sept – June. Or you can get me online….. Anyway, aside from prose book projects…As First-St. Andrew’s United Church’s new writer-in-residence I’ve begun a poem chapbook springing from the imagery in its stained-glass windows; and Open Mic regulars might recall that my ongoing full-length poem ms right now is Poems for City Hall: A Murder Book, which looks at famous or infamous actual murder cases from Woodstock, Ontario. I grew up nearby, went to highschool there and only recently left the community for London. And as I note in one of those poems, Woodstock might as well have invented, as reality, the literary genre that Western U’s CanLit wags dubbed “Souwesto Gothic”. That said, my heart was drawn to the challenges of writing compassionately and sensitively about tragic & violent (and often, just plain absurd: badly planned, gauche, stupid) deaths that are quite real; and I’m moved by the need to voice what very few ever consider – the experiences of the people in a community who are going through these horrors in parallel, because it’s been done by, and happened to, their own. After 9:30 pm. May 11, 2012 Now the great wing of night settles over us. After the trial after our worst nightmares' confirmation after the verdict, we breathe again. We have learned. At the end of the green road to heaven a blonde girl smiles in a pink kerchief, whole before it all happened. After this we will not be whole. In the night jury going home at last, news-hours scrolling talking heads and crawl lines, our relief, loss grow huge spread like fog. Only the great wing of night can cover us now, can comfort this ravaged town. …From a suite on the investigation and murder trial of small Tori Stafford. Alas now this theme – that I noticed & began writing about over five years ago – has acquired a complex ghastly new subject: Elizabeth Wettlaufer. Among her eight victims was my Grade One teacher. SB. Poetry helped you deal with the harsh reality that was forced on you. Do you think that poetry in general has some special ability in that direction? RMB. Yes. Unquestionably. Poetry makes its way to us because the right poetry heals. Poetry Heals. And the quality or literary aspiration of that poetry, in critical terms, doesn’t actually have much bearing on its healing power! Yet after all why shouldn’t it heal? No matter what the subject, poetry as an energetic force is an expression of living Soul – not an expression of death. BIO Robyn Marie Butt has an extensive background not only in poetry but also in drama for the stage and fiction and nonfiction--including criticism. Her career as a poet began later than the others. After contracting Lyme Disease, Robyn turned seriously to the shorter art of poetry, imagining it would be ‘less taxing’. Since then, she has placed numerous times in open poetry competitions, and with Boularderie Island Press has published four colour-illustrated volumes with complete audiobooks called A Hundred Poems About Flowers. A project that began its life as a public exhibition series of art, poem-text, and poem-audio, she wrote, administered and produced the 100 poems, performed the four complete audiobooks, and painted the 25 works for the final installment. The Hundred Poems About Flowers exhibit toured to multiple venues in Tillsonburg, Woodstock, and around Oxford County, and showed twice in London, Ontario. Review with photos: https://www.facebook.com/events/408959283207434/ Robyn Marie Butt’s book of short stories, Seasons of Ordinary Time, was chosen best book of the year by Scene Magazine and has since been republished with a second trade press. For two years, Robyn was a live public radio host on a show about theatre, and had original plays produced by CBC TV and CBC Radio, where her audio drama Queenie’s History of the World won honours and awards both nationally and internationally. She has been playwright-in-residence at The Factory Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille in Toronto, where she co-hosted a playwrights’ reading series. She was Creative Nonfiction Editor for the literary magazine Pottersfield Portfolio and has written on arts & culture for the Halifax Herald and various arts magazines. In Toronto, Robyn was an invited member of the Six Playwrights Unit at the Tarragon Theatre as well as of several playwrights’ groups at Canadian Stage. She has taught both creative writing & journalism for Fanshawe College and Georgian Bay College of the Arts, and has edited drama, fiction, and nonfiction professionally.
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