Bronwen Tate: Writer, Teacher, Mother, Friend
Interview with a multi-talented, relentlessly improving earthy soul
Dear Reader,
A successful and rewarding combination of creativity and the everyday is neither a given nor for the faint of heart. But multi-talented makes it all seem inherently easy. Bronwen, who owns a PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, is an award-winning poet and a warm-hearted academician who loves teaching and advocating for inclusive pedagogy. In addition, she is an affectionate mother with a breezy aura who values free time as a tool for growth and creativity development for herself and her kids. Her painful experiences on her way to motherhood are reflected in her critically acclaimed poetry book, “The Silk The Moths Ignore,” where love meets grief and flesh meets spirit.
Upon accidentally discovering Bronwen’s Substack, I instantly felt that I had met a new and kind friend with a flair for teaching. Her “Ok, but how?” newsletter is an ode to the intellectual-meets-the-quotidian - a mish-mash of inspiration and practical advice for navigating a life of creativity, all while tending to a household and raising a family, unaffected by the surrounding busyness frenzy.
So without further ado, behold the multi-talented Bronwen Tate with childhood anecdotes, book recommendations, and a funny story from her trip to Greece. I am confident that by the end of this interview, you will be eager to dive into her acclaimed poetry and explore her forthcoming book projects. Rejoice!
Dear Bronwen, you are an award-winning poet, a writer, and a teacher of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC. Out of these vocations, which one do you enjoy the most and why?
Writing and teaching writing have gone hand-in-hand for me for a long time. Ideally, and often practically, these are mutually supportive activities: digging into students’ work and interests introduces me to new poets, raises new questions, and pushes me to clarify how I think about my craft, while making my own work sends me into the classroom with a fresh and pressing sense of the challenges and discoveries of writing.
Many of my most successful assignments have grown out of attempts to reverse engineer a process I worked out gradually through trial and error and offer students a way to get there sooner and smoother. For example, when I wanted to get a deeper knowledge of line breaks and lineation in poetry after working in prose poems with a focus on syntax and sound, I designed an apprenticeship for myself: reading poems by C.D. Wright, Mary Ruefle, and others I saw doing deliberate and interesting work at the level of the line, while also reading craft essays by James Longenbach, Carl Phillips, Ellen Bryant Voigt and others. I made exercises for myself emerging out of these readings and wrote commonplace book entries reflecting on specific passages and bringing them into conversation with one another. Drawing on this experience, I designed a “Poetic Apprenticeship” assignment that I first used as a final project and later came to use as a foundational structure for an entire term.
Of course, when time gets tight, when graduate admissions portfolio reading aligns with serving on a search committee, and a TA gets a migraine, and I have a new lecture to prepare and a big stack of marking, teaching and writing can feel in friction. I often try to keep at least a small space for writing, but sometimes the press of deadlines and demands makes it almost impossible to enter that tentative, inefficient, exploratory space of trying to make something new. That’s why I’m so grateful for times like now when I can enter a summer schedule and flip the ratio: a small block of time dedicated to email and pragmatics and some big open spaces for writing and reading. These times are ultimately essential for my teaching as well. They’re when I read new books, get ideas for new assignments and courses, and reconnect with my own curiosity and pleasure in discovery. All of this lets me bring fresh energy to the classroom in September.
You are also a mother of two. How do you “balance” (if such a balance indeed exists) or combine parenting responsibilities with your work and in what way(s) does the experience of motherhood affect your creative process?
I’ve recently written a good bit on the relationship between caregiving and creative work for Nancy Reddy’s Good Creatures interview series (mine is coming soon!). Practically, I would say that having a partner who is a full co-parent has been crucial, from the earliest days when I was finishing my Ph.D. and I’d wake up and nurse the baby, then tuck him in next to my husband and walk down the street to a coffeeshop to work on my dissertation. The children are nearing nine and twelve now, increasingly independent. They’re reading or doing Lego or off with friends staging lightsaber battles in the breezeway between the two sides of our apartment building!
Vancouver housing is hugely expensive, so we live in a pretty small apartment. Sometimes I can work at the kitchen table or on the couch, but mostly I bike over to my campus office. These summer days between class sessions, I’m often the only one in the hall, but I love my office in summer. The trees outside my window finally get leaves! I make a cup of tea and settle into my big yellow IKEA armchair with my notebook. Suddenly, the workspace feels like a studio space. Plus, I’m a ten-minute walk from a steep path down to a gorgeous rocky beach! Expensive Vancouver has its compensations. Having everything—apartment, office, kids’ school—within walking/biking distance makes a tremendous difference in being able to show up fully in parenting and at work.
I’d also add that I’ve pushed myself to clarify what aspects of parenting feel essential to me and which don’t. What feels most important is spending time with my children that we both enjoy, for them to experience me taking pleasure in their company (which isn’t hard to do—they’re delightful!). We cook together, do art projects, go to the beach, try out a new ice cream or donut shop, sit on a blanket in a park and read our various books, pile onto the couch to watch a TV show, and then make endless call-back jokes to it. . . Some things I’ve let myself off the hook for: having a consistently clean apartment, bringing a gift to a classmate’s birthday (sometimes we get it together, sometimes we don’t), and an intense schedule of sports or enrichment activities. The kids take swim lessons (when I can manage to book them—they fill up in under 5 minutes, it’s bananas!) and sometimes they’ll do an afterschool class in Bollywood dance or anime drawing at the community center, but they have a lot of unstructured time. And I’m not an activities chauffeur.
What were your childhood reading experiences and when did you first encounter poetry?
My parents read to me, so some of my earlier readings were The Secret Garden, The Hobbit, and Little House on the Prairie read out loud. When I started reading chapter books on my own, I devoured Anne of Green Gables and other L.M Montgomery and Louisa May Alcott books; I remember my mother hiding an Anne book to try to get me to do chores and how jubilant I was to find my book in a drawer—ah ha!
With poetry specifically, my earliest encounters were through church. My father is an Orthodox priest—a spiritual seeker and convert—so I grew up immersed in the Orthodox liturgy and cycle of services. The purple minor tones of Lent, the exuberant metaphors in an Akathist, the odd bits of archaic phrasings or strange translations all feel now like throughlines to a poetic relationship to language.
Also, I read and memorized “The Highwayman” (and I still recite part of it when I teach intro poetry and talk about the stickiness of rhyme). I liked the sound, the rhythm, the melodrama. The first poem I wrote was about a character in Lord of the Rings (which my former student Jason got me to read on his podcast Writers Read Their Early Sh*t). At 15, I went to Switzerland as an exchange student and encountered French poetry: Hugo, Baudelaire, Apollinaire. My host mother gave me a copy of Les Fleurs du Mal, and I memorized poems from that too.
Ok, we’ve reached the story of my one and only trip to Greece (so far!) that I promised you. As an exchange student, I wanted to take advantage of being in Europe to travel anywhere I could possibly afford. My priest father arranged with a local Greek priest for me to visit some of his extended family in Athens. This was 1998, so limited internet and cell phones, mind you. I wrote a note to these relatives, saying how grateful I was to get to visit them before returning to the US later in the summer. But somehow, they understood my note as a change in plans or got the dates mixed up! At any rate, I arrived in Athens, and there was no one there to collect me. I think I tried to call them on a pay phone, but the phone just rang.
On the plane, I’d chatted with the man next to me about his kids and life in Greece while he smoked a cigarette. Smoking was allowed on Olympic Airlines then! Eventually, he collected his bags and walked out to see me looking forlorn on the curb. He invited me to share a taxi and use his cellphone to call home. And maybe because we’d talked about his kids, I trusted him and got in the car. I called my dad, and he got ahold of his friend, who in turn tracked down an old friend, an American woman who’d married a Greek man and lived outside Athens, who said she’d be happy to have a sixteen-year-old stay with her for a week. I got her address, and my rescuer got the taxi to drop me off there. Amazing.
And it was great! We ate thick yogurt and honey and swam in the sea and listened to her old Beatles records and hiked around the Sounion temple ruins and took outdoor showers and got along beautifully. She had a Loreena McKennitt recording of “The Stolen Child”. When she saw I liked it, she showed me it was a Yeats poem and read me “He Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven” as well. She gave me the book—Yeats’ Selected Poems— when I left. I’m realizing now just how many of these early formative poetry encounters were gifts from women. Such big gratitude to them for seeing that sensitive weird kid and nourishing that love of words.
You are a passionate advocate for inclusive pedagogy, which is one of the reasons you are so beloved by your students. In your opinion, what is the current state of inclusive teaching in Canada, and what remains to be done?
Pedagogical approaches to creative writing can vary wildly from institution to institution and even from person to person within a single department. Having completed all of my own schooling in the US and taught there for my post-doc and my first academic job, I’d say I’m still getting to know the landscape of creative writing teaching in Canada. I’ve attended the ACCUTE (Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English) several times and found lots of interest in topics like supporting revision, approaches to feedback, and inclusive workshop methods.
As far as what remains to be done, I’d point to a few things:
Inclusive teaching takes time. Reliable work, small class sizes (or good TA support), and reasonable teaching loads make it possible to respond to individual learning needs, offer substantive feedback, meet with students in conferences, and so on. In Canada, as in the US, institutions often rely on adjunct labor and continue to raise course enrolment caps with no acknowledgment of the increase in workload (in draft reading, email responses, etc.) So, a necessary pre-requisite to inclusive teaching is simply good working conditions. I mean, I’ve seen exploited overworked teachers bring great skill and generosity to their teaching, but this isn’t sustainable. I want more for teachers and for students.
There are still remnants of what I think of as an old-school model of creative writing teaching. Its two salient features are 1) an assumption of homogeneity (shared aesthetics, shared cultural touchstones, shared understanding of audience, craft terms, and so on), and 2) an understanding of the creative writing class as building on a foundation of skill and a reading practice acquired elsewhere, of the classroom, then, as a space for demonstrating skills but not necessarily acquiring them. These approaches make a certain sense in a version of universities where already-accomplished writers, who happen to be mostly white men of a similar socio-economic status with similar taste, hone their craft. But that’s not today’s classroom, thank goodness! So we need methods that acknowledge the plurality of our students (in culture, age, aesthetics, life circumstances) and that offer students ways to learn and grow, not just demonstrate what they already know.
I see new threats to inclusive teaching in both the rise of Generative AI and in certain reactions to that rise. I’m astonished by what strikes me as an unconsidered embrace of Generative AI on tech companies’ terms by some university administrators! But I also see punitive reactions from teachers who have made their way through a stack of ChatGPT-generated stories or poems and are understandably distressed. As I see it, teachers can move toward a culture of paranoid surveillance (and maybe assign timed handwritten work or warn students that they may be called upon to prove their authorship at any point), or we can try to connect students to process and purpose. Their own purpose. It’s not always easy. But I think it’s essential.
Aside from your acclaimed work as a poet, writer, and educator, you are also the creator of the “Ok, but how?” newsletter, which is among my personal favorites here, on Substack. I love it because it strikes a carefully balanced mix of work and play, process and creativity - and maintains an ideal publication schedule that leaves us just enough time to miss you! Given your already heavy load of commitments, what prompted you to start writing this newsletter?
Ha, yes. Essentially, I’ve decided the newsletter is worth doing if I can do it without stressing about it. I first started Ok, But How? because so many wonderful students pass through my classes, and we work closely together, and then they graduate and move on with their lives. I wanted an easy way for them to hear from me and maybe feel moved to check-in with a comment or reply via email now and then. I also wanted a way to continue to be in conversation with folks—former colleagues, people I met at conferences or residencies or readings—without having to rely on the algorithms of social media.
Thanks to conversations with my friend Jill on Noted and with Nancy Reddy on Write More, Be Less Careful, other folks with an interest in writing and reading and process have also found the newsletter meaningful, which is a delight.
So far, the schedule has been unapologetically sporadic because I’m teaching and serving as undergraduate chair and I’m a parent with a book deadline. I’m germinating a bunch of new ideas this summer though (summer schedule!), so it might get more regular for a bit. We’ll see!
Which books are on your nightstand at the moment?
Always so many! They grow into precarious piles and fall on me in the night. A few on top: Death by a Thousand Cuts, hilarious smart short stories by Shashi Bhat; Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah’s heartrending and essential new book [...], my friend Kate Schapira’s Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counselling Booth: How to Live with Care and Purpose in an Endangered World, Claudia Dey’s Daughter, Joy Harjo’s memoir, Carl Phillips’ Then the War, Sarah J. Maas’s House of Shadow and Flame on an e-reader, printed out manuscript pages from my friend A.E. Osworth’s forthcoming novel Awakened, in which trans witches fight AI with magic, a poetry thesis by my student Andrea Scott. . .
Do you have any upcoming books or projects you would like to announce?
My main focus at the moment is a resource book for teaching creative writing, which I’m co-writing with my colleague John Vigna. It’s under contract with Bloomsbury Academic, and we’re nearing the final chapter, but we still have a bunch of tightening and revision to do! The book features over forty interviews with teachers and writers, which was a big undertaking, but I’m so happy to include this plurality of voices, experiences, and approaches.
I also have another poetry collection in the works, with poems like this one published in TYPO and these in Court Green, and I’m working on an essay/memoir project as well. It seems I can’t stop trying to learn new things.
Bronwen Tate has recently started a new series of short conversations with her writer friends, exploring the experience of writing as both making and solving problems. So do not miss subscribing to her newsletter or visiting her website to check out this exciting new content - it is sure to be a real treat!
Thank you for reading,
Katerina