David Waltner-Toews

An Interview with David Waltner-Toews

Many of your poems seem inspired by everyday life. What first inspired and continues to inspire you to write poetry?

The first poem that I remember writing...I had to write, for talking in class...in grade five, as a punishment. I wrote one of these Christmas poems that completely rhymes …something about the three wise men. [My teacher] liked it so much it got published in the Manitoba Teacher’s Society Journal, so I thought that was pretty cool. I must have been writing before that...[but] I don’t actually remember. I do remember in high school writing poems for people’s birthdays and things like that. I started writing poetry fairly early--a lot of really bad poetry--but you know, that’s the way it goes.

Do you write poetry to be read by others? If so, what do you hope your poetry will achieve?

At its best, I think poetry is a way of communicating human experience so that it...enables people to understand each other’s experiences better and it helps us feel in solidarity or community. You read somebody else’s poem and say, “Oh I felt just like that once too,” especially if it’s really written well.... You begin to feel like it creates a sense of being human that’s not just individual. Even though it draws on individual experience, it makes...you feel like you’re part of the larger human race because you’re not the only one who has had those experiences.

You are one of a number of well-known Canadian writers of Russian Mennonite descent who have decided to write about that aspect of their lives and communities. What is it about the nature of the Russian Mennonite experience that seems to force its members to comment on it?

That’s a good question that I think a lot of people have tried to figure out. There are a number of things. One is that Russian Mennonite history is fairly traumatic; there’s this sense of having been Russian, and then the Revolution came along and everything got torn up...people got killed and they emigrated around the world and...came to this country....I grew up with these people trying to figure out what happened. There we were living our normal lives, doing quite well; everything seemed to be okay, and then suddenly everything just fell apart.... So there was this sort of self-evaluation, trying to interpret your history;  there’s this collective history and also individual history.

The Russian Mennonites that I grew up with had very strong opinions on things, like they...were right and everybody else [was] wrong. It forced you to always to take positions. If you’re not on this side, then you [must] be on the other side. If you don’t believe this, then you must believe that. I guess in some ways writing is a way of trying to get past that, of trying to say, I don’t accept those dichotomies. I’m going to talk about human experience as direct human experience. I’m not immediately trying to judge it as being this or that.... There’s a lot of Mennonite writing now, but that hasn’t always been true of Russian Mennonites. It took a generation before people said, “You know I’m tired of this ‘I’m right and you’re wrong’ thing. I’m going to try to just tell the story. I’m going to try to document the experience and let someone else figure out whether it’s right or wrong.”

I think the Mennonites who have been in North America for a long time [are] actually much more tolerant. What happens then is that...people aren’t challenged as much to write; they don’t feel conflicted and anguished, all of those things that sometimes lead to good writing.... Jeff Gundy and people like that, they haven’t grown up with that sense of angst...that your soul is in peril every time you put your pen to paper. I think it actually becomes a kind of driving force, that kind of angst and energy and the sense that your soul is in peril and you’ve got to write your way out of it somehow.... American Mennonites have had a sense of tolerance and liberality that sort of says, “Well, you want to be a writer. That’s okay.” Sometimes for a writer that’s not a good thing. It’s better if somebody challenges you, because in a sense that says your writing is important. If people say, “That’s terrible. You shouldn’t be writing that,” that means they’re actually reading it and paying attention to it. [But] if they say, “Well ya, you can write and somebody else…can be a farmer and somebody else can be businessman, that’s all okay,” it’s like, well maybe it doesn’t matter if I write.

Your community’s history and your own personal experience are clearly present in your poetry, yet in several of your poems you show how the past can hinder life lived in the present. In “The Impossible Uprooting," you use the image of uprooting as one that spurs new life. Is this perhaps a reflection on your own growth out of a community whose roots run so deep?
 
There’s a kind of contradiction there. On the one hand, I grew up in a family where we were steeped in Mennonite history....In a sense I was just tired of it and I wanted to escape it.... On the one hand, you can’t get away from it because that’s who you are, that's where you come from. On the other hand, you want to try and get past that and create new things, and so sometimes that’s traumatic. It can be both personally traumatic and also [for] the larger culture. There was a sense, I think, that when the Russian Mennonites got kicked out and a lot of people got killed and they came to North America, that was a tragedy but it was also an opportunity to do something new and to do something different. There’s a sense of “The Impossible Uprooting,” [but] on the one hand you’ve got the uprooting actually happening.

On the other hand, there’s this sense that you can’t uproot some of these things. You carry them around for life. Actually, in that particular poem there’s a section: “There’s no point in my digging here. I uproot myself if I try to uproot you.” There’s this sense that you can’t uproot anything. [But also] there’s this sense that everything gets uprooted and you start over. You can talk about things like that, I suppose, with poetry and in literature that you can’t in traditional Mennonite plain-speaking where it’s either this or it’s that. Life is usually more complicated than that. It’s both this and that. Literature enables you to talk about those kinds of things. People are much more complicated and history is much more complicated than just this or that. It’s usually a bit of everything all thrown together.