Six Questions for Lisa Martin
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Lisa Martin is an award-winning poet and essayist. She is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, One Crow Sorrow (Brindle & Glass, 2008), Believing is Not the Same as Being Saved (University of Alberta Press, 2017), and Nighthawks (University of Alberta Press, 2026). She is co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss. Her first novel is A Story Can Be Told About Pain (NeWest Press, 2025). Her work has received the Stephan G. Stephansson Award for Poetry, The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award for Poetry, an Independent Publishers (IPPY) award, and a National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism. She was a finalist for the Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize in 2018. Her scholarly monograph, Creative Writing in Post-Secondary Education: Practice, Pedagogy, and Research, will be out in paperback in Fall 2026. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at MacEwan University in Edmonton, on Treaty 6 territory.
MG: You recently released Nighthawks, a poetry collection that "traces a creaturely interconnectedness, traversing land, ecology, and other boundaries amid crises unfolding at a global scale" (University of Alberta Press). The scope of this collection is enormous, but its perspective is focused and deeply personal. Were the poems in Nighthawks composed to become part of one collection, or were they brought together afterward? What more can you tell us about this book?
LM: These are poems that I wrote over a long period of time. Some of them I wrote before my last collection (Believing is not the same as Being Saved) was published and they just didn’t belong in that collection so I pulled them back out. The poems in Nighthawks cohere around the experience of being in a particular place and being attentive to that place, to the other creatures that live there or that are passing through. It’s a book that holds grief and landscape together, that thinks about human grief in and through this more-than-human ecosystem that human grief is one small part of. All of my books do that thinking—about grief and place, mortality and wildness—to some degree, but this collection really foregrounds it—and then it’s also about the end of my marriage to a person—an ecologist—who really got me in the first place learning more deeply about the place I live and the other creatures that live here, too. So, to answer your question, the collection evolved very slowly over time. As opposed to a collection like Believing is not the same as Being Saved, which developed very intentionally as a collection organized around specific ideas from the very beginning, I didn’t think of all of the poems in Nighthawks as part of a specific collection at the time I was writing them, but eventually it became clear to me that everything gathered here belonged together as a book.
MG: How do your poems develop? Can you describe your creative process?
LM: This varies quite a bit from poem to poem. Sometimes I start out with a specific idea or a specific form. The Typology sonnets in Nighthawks are an example of that—I just kind of went on a lark thinking about the Myers Briggs personality type indicator and somehow sonnets seemed to make sense for what I was up to, that experiment—and it was a very playful process to generate those poems. Most of the time, though, a poem for me starts with a strong emotion—the kind of emotion that threatens to level the ground of your life. Grief, most often, but also distress about what is and was at the time I was writing happening in (and to) the commons. A poem, for me, is the way to get through a spasm of pain or a difficult experience and metabolize all of that energy in some way, harness it so that it doesn’t—to switch metaphors—throw me. I don’t write poetry as often in midlife as I did in my twenties, and I think that is partly about having other ways of metabolizing difficulty now, whereas I used to only have poetry.
Anyway, you asked me to describe my process. I have to feel like there is a poem trying to happen—I have to have an image, or a line, or some kind of felt sense, an intuition. And if I have that, I just try to get things down—I work with the lines that I can get to, try different line breaks and line lengths, different stanza configurations, and I just kind of muck around until I have something that feels coherent enough, like it’s in some kind of tension with itself at the level of form, and has a tautness and sufficient exactness. And then I usually share it with someone. A friend who is a poet, or often my twin sister who isn’t a poet but is a reader. On the other hand, sometimes I can’t get it all the way to a place where there is enough exactness and then it lives as a draft for longer. When I was younger I was quite tenacious about returning to things and working on them. Now I tend to accept it more if something isn’t quite coming together. Sometimes if I look at it a lot later I can see easily what might work. Other times, I still can’t, and then it seems to me I’m just at the limit of my skill and my ability to bring the thing into being—and it’s either well-realized enough to share, or I leave it, and let it be a poem that didn’t quite work. I’m really against sharing everything I write. I want what I decide to share to be really worth a reader’s time, to earn a reader’s (sacred) attention and to reward it.
MG: You also write fiction. In May 2025, you released your debut novel, A Story Can Be Told About Pain (NeWest Press). What can you tell us about this book?
LM: A Story Can Be Told About Pain is in the first place about a teenager, Shiloh, who moves to the city with her mom after an accident upends their lives. It’s about how she tries to come to terms with an abrupt and traumatic loss and how she hurts herself in the process, but it’s also about the stories we tell ourselves about our lives, and about our pain—and how those stories shape the lives we actually get to live. Shiloh and her mom move into an affordable housing complex run by a fundamentalist church that backs onto the grounds of a ruined asylum, and—over the course of a single summer--their lives collide with their neighbours’ lives until things begin to happen that can’t be undone.
It’s a book that takes up some heavy material—some of the characters are carrying difficult family legacies, trying to figure out how to live with trauma and guilt. But I believe it’s a hopeful book, a life-affirming book. It’s a book that is trying to walk its characters to a place where they can say “yes” to their lives, but I wanted to be able to do that without cheating. I really wanted, without betraying my characters or their struggles, to give the reader a good place to land with respect to this difficult question of how we live with pain—our own, and one another’s.
MG: How does writing fiction compare to writing poetry?
LM: Writing fiction takes much longer but you can work away at it steadily and faithfully. Whereas poetry can happen in a flash but you can’t—I can’t, anyway—just sit down and do it. You have to kind of court it—get your head into a certain space, move through life with a poetic attention, which can be hard to do when you have a lot of responsibilities or pressures. Milan Kundera said prose is the thing to write in mid-life because mid-life is so prosaic. That made a lot of sense to me when I first read it. But I’m glad I have both prose and poetry.
MG: Who are your favourite writers/poets and why?
LM: Lately I’ve been on a real Seamus Heaney kick. Heaney grew up in Northern Ireland not far from where my dad grew up and they both went to Queen’s in Belfast, just a few years apart. My dad passed in 1988, so Heaney’s work—and his voice, that accent—have been a way for me to connect to some of what I’ve lost in losing my dad so young (he was only 43). My favorite contemporary writer is probably Zadie Smith. She is just such a smart, sharp, brave writer who has managed to stay connected to and to continue to write from what she, herself, thinks through a period of time that has made most writers wobble. I admire her profoundly even when I disagree with her. Her fiction is what’s made her famous, but it’s her essays I love her for. Marilynne Robinson is another writer I admire a great deal—her novels are deeply philosophical, ontologically curious, and emotionally profound. There are, of course, the early influences—for me The Brothers Karamazov was a huge one, and my novel is really deeply influenced by and inspired by that long Russian novel about the problem of evil. More recently, Karen Solie’s new collection Wellwater is a stunner. I can’t recommend it highly enough. It thinks so acutely about ecological crisis, memory, farming, the cost of living. Solie’s work is so exact and exacting—I have the sense of feeling-and-thinking more acutely, more deftly and sharply as I move through her poems. And this is my favourite of her books so far.
MG: What is the best writing advice you've ever been given?
LM: I had the immense good fortune of working with Don McKay at the Banff Centre in 2004, when I was just starting out and hadn’t published a thing yet. I went into an editorial meeting with him—I’d given him some poems in advance to read—and at some point in that meeting he said: “Lisa, I have two words for you.” Then he paused for effect, and delivered them: “Aesthetic. Clarity.” We talked a bit more about that and it really changed everything about my writing at that time. I became willing to be incredibly clear, something I think is absolutely required of a poem if it is going to really work, at least the kind of poem I like to read and try to write. I had been trying to stuff too much into my poems, probably out of an anxiety that my poems wouldn’t be interesting enough otherwise. I began to risk clarity and that risk sharpened my thinking, put more pressure on what I was doing.
Books by Lisa Martin
University of Alberta Press
NeWest Press
Creative Writing in Post-Secondary Education: Practice, Pedagogy, and Research. Bloomsbury Academic
Follow Lisa on Instagram
Nighthawks Book Launch: Tuesday, March 31, 2026 at 7pm | Edmonton, Alberta | Paper Birch Books | Register Here (registration is encouraged but not required)
