NATALIE RICE is the author of Nightjar (Gaspereau Press, 2025) and Scorch (Gaspereau Press,
2023). Her poems have appeared in journals such as Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, EVENT, The
Malahat Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Terrain.org and several others. She lives in Nova
Scotia, Canada.

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FOG

Like something distant
and bright not everything
has to be perfect

form. What you see at dusk:
a swatch of red osier

that softens everything. Fog
greets aspen as a ghost would.
Like the field unburdened

by gravity, you return
unafraid. Across the field,

horses haul to the barn.
A pool of window-light below
winter sky.

“Fog” was published in Nightjar (Gaspereau Press, 2025), and is included here with permission
from Gaspereau Press. A previous version of this poem, entitled “Doubt,” appeared in EVENT
53/2.

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Elena Johnson: Congratulations on the recent publication of your second book, Nightjar, out with Gaspereau Press earlier this year! I had just finished reading your previous book, Scorch (Gaspereau, 2023), when I started working on this interview, and received a copy of Nightjar, as well, before finishing up my questions.

Both collections foreground a deep attentiveness to the natural world and a focus on place. In Scorch, the ecological focus incorporates solitude, grief and a post-wildfire landscape.  In Nightjar, I noticed an additional focus on the human history of the places you’re writing about, particularly in poems such as “Dispatches from the Subalpine,”  “A Brief History of Lunenburg County,” and the ethereal “A Door in Hollow Mountain,” which was inspired by a text about handpick mining in Cape Breton. How did this shift in focus come about, as you were working on this new collection? And do you notice other differences between the two collections? Did your approach to writing new poems, or to building a manuscript, change?

Natalie Rice: Scorch was very much shaped by an extreme wildfire season in the Okanagan valley. At that time, I had lived in the Okanagan for over a decade and was captivated by the valley’s drought and wildfire presence. It was impossible to write alongside that landscape without considering fire. If Scorch was about fire and candling ponderosa pines, Nightjar is about mountains as old oceans in the sky, fog, vapour, and stones.

It’s true, Nightjar is slightly more interested in human history and the ways we pass through and often alter natural landscapes. As a result, the collection also follows my own transcontinental movements between Nova Scotia, the Rockies and then back to Nova Scotia where I now live in an old, oceanfront home that was once a ship’s chandlery. There is a grave in the yard, where daffodils bloom. Pipe stems, coins and lead shot can be found in the tidal mud along the shore. Living with these visible markings of how these places and spaces have changed over time has brought me to a poetics that considers the importance of these stories. 

Scorch began as my thesis. I completed my MFA at UBC Okanagan in 2022. The degree gave me the skill and practice I needed to talk about my work, frame and contextualize it, as well as work through a full-length manuscript project for the first time. For my second collection, I found the process to be much more relaxed and natural. I enjoyed seeing the structures emerge naturally throughout the writing process. 

EJ: What would you say were your main influences while writing Nightjar? And how did this title come to you?  

NR: This title did not come for a long time. Scorch came at the very end of the writing process, and so I expected the same for the second collection. However, it wasn’t until quite close to publication that I settled on Nightjar.

I knew the second collection enacted a falling sideways through the one-way gates and passages that make up our lives. The image of the nightjar falling in the poem “Mill Pond at Dusk” was the most striking image of the unexpected forces that pull us into newness and possibility. Nightjar is a landscape of night images, iron red streams and bogs, eel grass, black trumpet, doors and gateways, fossils, a path grown over by old apple trees. 

EJ: In Scorch, I especially love the poem “Summer Mountain.” From the first few stanzas, I gather that you lived for a few summer months in a rustic cabin near Protection Mountain, in the Banff area. How long were you there, and how isolated was it? Is this a place you’ve returned to since? I notice that Protection Mountain is mentioned again in your acknowledgements for Nightjar; were some of the Nightjar poems written on a return visit?  

NR: I lived in the cabin under Protection Mountain in Banff National Park for a total of nine months over the two years that I worked for National Parks in Lake Louise. The cabin is only about 20 minutes from Lake Louise, but in an area where there was no cell service, and I would sometimes stay there into the late fall, or until the pipes started to freeze. The grey light from Castle Mountain and Protection Mountain was only lonely in the way I wanted it to be lonely. I loved falling asleep to the metallic screeching of trains. I’ve returned once since, and over the summer of 2023 I lived there and wrote the high altitude, mountain section of Nightjar. 

EJ:  In “Summer Mountain,” you write, “I wanted to be lonely,…” and in the poem, “Slit of Morning Light,”  “I want to feel alone but don’t.”  What is the role of solitude in your work?  How important is it be alone, or even lonely? Did those periods of time under Protection Mountain change your relationship to – or feelings about – solitude?

NR: I wanted to feel a sense of agency in my life, and a ruthless independence. At the time, the Okanagan hillsides were burning, and my own life was in a similar state. My marriage had ended, and I wanted the clear air of being alone. I wanted “this impossible / distance” and “mountains / of impossible cloud slants and snow,” as the opening poem in Scorch states. In my isolation, I found my voice echoing back in a way I hadn’t ever experienced before. A burnt-out hole of grief, perhaps. The loneliness I found under Protection Mountain was one that offered me exactly what it was named for. Shelter. Reprieve. Protection as I moved between one thing and the next. 

EJ: In Scorch’s “After the Forest Fire,” you write, 

…Poetry
is about noticing
the deer, the hillside,
the moon. 

How does a poem come to be, for you, and what is your editorial process like? Do your poems often come out fairly polished on the first draft? Do you tend to pare them down, or to add to them, over time? 

NR: That sentiment came from walking the Okanagan hills with a friend, and I would say most of my poems occur after walking in the forest. Poems usually come out fairly polished and close to their final form. I only sit down to write if I’ve caught myself on a sharp image or have a heard or felt sense of what I want to say. I like to write in front of a window. I’m lucky enough now to have a writing room that overlooks the tidal river. 

I like to tinker, and unsettlingly I could tinker with poems for ages. The poems change the most in the final stages of the editing process before a collection gets printed. That’s when I pare down and look for redundancies. How a poem appears on the page is very important to me, but its aural quality is far more important. I’ll often read the whole collection and record it so that when I play it back, I can hear where my edits need to be made.

Andrew Steeves once likened my poems to dry fly fishing, and while I don’t know a lot about fly fishing, I would have to agree with this statement. A sparse and pared down approach is what feels most natural. I see the world in a series of patterned images, and so I consider my poems to be small language machines that cast out and pull back. Just a barb or a hook that gets straight to the point. Nothing flourished or fancy.  

EJ: The titular poem in Scorch explores a post-wildfire landscape in the Okanagan. What was it like to write in and about this environment?   

NR: At that time, I was interested in exploring individual systems of loss within larger systems of ecological loss. I was living in an ecoculture center as part of a writing residency I was doing through UBC-Okanagan and became very interested in learning the names of grasses and wildflowers that grew in that semi-arid desert landscape. Often, ash fell from the sky like snow. I wanted the poems to enact both the emergency of climate crisis and the emergence of newness, while recognizing that a useful kind of hopefulness is one that considers that loss and beauty sometimes entwine. I found this hopefulness in the arrow leaf balsam root flower or the ponderosa pines with their thick, red, armour-like bark. Scorch ended up being my goodbye to the Okanagan, as I moved east shortly after it was published. 

EJ: So many of the poems in both of your collections respond to place, falling somewhere between geopoems, ecopoems, and contemplative meditations, set or written in the Okanagan, the Banff area, Nova Scotia, and elsewhere. Which place – or places – are you writing about now?

NR: In 2023, I moved to the South Shore of Nova Scotia. In my second collection, there are many “ecopoems” about the landscape around my home: the brook, the berry patch, the loop through the old apple orchard behind the house, the tidal river, and the old roads and wells. After many years of feeling unsettled and adrift in British Columbia and Alberta, I feel for the first time, a sense of home. I’ve been warmly welcomed to this little cove and have a growing sense of community and belonging here. 

EJ: What are you working on these days? Is there a new poetry collection in progress?

NR: I’m about sixty pages into a third collection of poems which I hope to complete by early spring, 2026. One of my favourite poems in this new collection, “Eel Weir” was shortlisted for The Malahat’s Long Poem Prize in 2025. I think my work will always be connected to landscape and the natural world. 

EJ: What have you been reading lately that you’ve found especially interesting or inspiring? What are you looking forward to reading next?

NR: Some titles I’ve enjoyed lately are: The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, Indelicacy by Amina Cain, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au. In terms of poetry, I’ve been reading Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris, A Village Life: Poems, Winter Recipes from the Collective, Richard Siken’s Crush, Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything, and a re-read of an old favourite, Lorine Niedecker’s The Granite Pail. 

EJ: What else has been inspiring you lately, in writing or in other aspects of your life?

NR: The garlic harvest. Beans, ground cherries, cabbage, sunflowers, tomatoes and lavender. Driving the Cabot Trail in early June. The small marine museums throughout Nova Scotia. Islands, with their fog and kelp covered rocks. My partner, Michael, and what it means to be two poets moving through the world noticing the bog laurel and moonwort and candy lichen. Working the night shift and moving through hemlock forests under stars. The way sea-light comes through our one-hundred-year-old windows. 

*This interview may have been edited for length or clarity.

– Elena Johnson

ELENA JOHNSON is the author of Field Notes for the Alpine Tundra (Gaspereau, 2015), a
collection of poems set at a remote ecology research station in the Yukon. Her poems have been
displayed on city buses, set to music, and performed by choirs in Vancouver and Brooklyn. She
is currently at work on a new collection. Luba Markovskaia’s French translation of her book,
Notes de terrain pour la toundra alpine, was published in 2021 by Jardin de givre, and won the
John Glassco Prize.