The Funicular Five: Lizzie Derksen
Lizzie Derken has written many poems. We’re going to publish a bunch of them on our website this week!
1. Who and where is Lizzie Derksen?
Lizzie Derksen is a writer and filmmaker from Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty 6 Territory. I'm the hostess of the multi-disciplinary salon Open Apartment, a founding member of the Open Apartment Publishing Collective, and one of the authors of Project Compass, the collaborative novel Funicular editor Jason Lee Norman published in 2017. More recently, I've finished writing my first full novel, which is called Orphans in the Game. You know that crush you got as a kid on some other kid's mom? Orphans in the Game is about that, and also about Y2K, evangelical doomsday hysteria, small towns, and exotic cats. While I try not to drown in the morass that is the lit agent querying process, I'm overseeing post-production on Shy Woman, a CBC documentary I'm making about women's friendship, and growing a small human.
2. Funicular readers are about to be introduced to a number of your poems that feature 'Aunt Rachel'. What would you like readers to know about Aunt Rachel beforehand and do you want to say more about this character that keeps reappearing in your work?
Aunt Rachel started out as a good title for a poem about composting, and has evolved into a working class woman in her 50s who works as a janitor and lives in the Strathcona neighbourhood with her wife Susan and their dog Ranger. Aunt Rachel is my favourite type of character, in writing and in real life: an autodidact, an ordinary person with lofty ideas, a philosophizer, over-zealous, a lover of the things she loves, cranky at times, defiantly human.
She says things Lizzie Derksen might be too embarrassed to say.
3. Say more about the recurring characters, if you’d like.
Susan, Aunt Rachel's wife and partner of over 30 years, and their Gen Z niece Lucy comprise the Aunt Rachel extended universe, sometimes speaking in poems of their own. Susan was born into a line that needed two extra syllables; Lucy announced her presence one morning when she announced that she was cleaning her apartment. If Aunt Rachel is bombastic, confrontational, a bit of a drama queen, Susan is her quieter (but perhaps even fiercer) counterpart. Less sure of herself, more melancholic, Susan gives voice to the ideas that even Rachel is afraid of of. Meanwhile, Lucy brings her own dose of angst and questions the infallibility of both older women. There's some healthy back-and-forth.
4. Do you approach writing poems that feature Aunt Rachel differently than when you're writing other poetry or does this process more closely resemble writing fiction when you're writing from the perspective of different characters?
Writing Aunt Rachel poems feels different from both fiction and my other poetry. Writing an Aunt Rachel poem mostly feels like an improv party game. The rhythm and diction of an Aunt Rachel poem is distinctive, within the context of my work, and adopting her voice leads me to conclusions I might never reach otherwise. Aunt Rachel is funnier, and wiser, and earthier. The main thing is that I don't feel I have to be serious, or accurate, or correct, or represent myself faithfully, which means, of course, that the Aunt Rachel poems are some of the truest and most vulnerable things I've written.
5. Are there other poets you've encountered who have their own Aunt Rachel in their poems?
Yes, and they've been major influences on me since I was a teenager. The two that come immediately to mind are Ted Hughes, who wrote a suite of poems in the voice of a sort of pagan Miltonic Satan character called Crow, and Ilya Kaminsky, whose most recent book Deaf Republic reads more like a play than a traditional poetry collection. I love both these poets' work in-character—again, because it tends to have more energy and capacity for playfulness and truthfulness. The burden of ego on a writer can be a real burden, I think. (One the reader also has to carry.)
You can read the first two Aunt Rachel poems right here.
photo credit Kelsey McMillan