Rob Winger: Embrace curiosity, ditch jerks, and read with attention to be a better writer

Rob Winger is the author of four books of poetry, most recently It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant (McClelland & Stewart, 2021). His work has been shortlisted, in Canada, for the Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and The Ottawa Book Awards, and won a CBC Literary Award.

Writer Rob Winger, whose mose recent poetry collection is It Doesn't Matter What We Meant. Photo: Kristal Davis

He lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches English and creative writing at Trent University. In this writer interview, Rob talks about the influences that have shaped his writing, the allure of poetry, and why a writer must read with attention to be a better writer.

OCW: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

RW: This is such a good question; and it’s of course also a wildly complicated one, especially since it seems true to me that most experiences at least partly shape how most of us think and write. I do wonder, at times, though, about foundational experience. I remember, years ago, for example, Kurt Vonnegut talking about how the primacy of the language that shapes us in childhood can be a welcome, natural part of how we write as adults. Out there in the fancy world of literary writing, that realization, for Vonnegut, involved embracing, in his work, his first language, which was the way he talked as a kid who grew up “in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.” He goes on: “I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have?” I wonder about that with my own work, which tries, I hope, to resist the melodramatic or the grandiose by grounding itself in the real most of the time, something I think a lot of working-class people tend to do, too.

Having grown up as a super smalltown, working-class kid in Ontario without much “high”-cultural experience, my first language was a practical one, like Vonnegut’s. And I see as a thread throughout my work a worry about self-seriousness that maybe results in a return, over and over, in my books, to the type of speaking and writing that tries to call bullshit on its own possibilities for self-congratulation. This doesn’t, of course, have to be true for everyone; and the idea that we’re forever fatefully formed by the accidental conditions of our places of birth or the uncontrollable circumstances of our childhoods strikes me as unhelpful if we think of those things as inflexible certainties. But I do sense some reformed version of that working-class voice in there, at times, from stanza to stanza, especially after the rush of first drafts within the more measured realms of editorial reconsideration.

The best teacher of creative writing is the library

OCW: Has your writing evolved over the years? If so, how? Through writing experience? Reading a lot? Writing courses or communities? A combination, or something else?

RW: That word, “evolved,” is an interesting one, I think, since it implies this sense of ever-increasing skill and a resulting hierarchy, maybe, that situates what we’re doing right now, in the present, as somehow more vital or informed than what we did before. I wonder about that (and excuse me, here, if I’m equivocating!) since I probably knew things fifteen or twenty years ago, when my first book came out, that I’m not sure I know anymore. Though I don’t generally revisit my old books, for instance, I’ve had that experience I’ve heard other folks talk about – preparing for a reading, say, when asked to think about some old project – of reading a few pages I made a decade or two back and wondering how I possibly could’ve known what I knew then since I’m unsure that’s really something I really know now, you know?

A more direct answer, perhaps: I’ve always thought that the best teacher of creative writing is the library. Reading is the key, for me – and I’m far from unique in saying this – to thinking about craft. I love to be wowed and moved by good pages. So I agree with Dionne Brand when she writes in her book, The Blue Clerk, that “The great interrogation room is the stanza.” That strikes me as exactly right. Sitting in the weirdness and discomfort or joy and connection of a book or a poem that knocks me flat is maybe my favourite way to learn about writing.

The ongoing allure of poetry

OCW: Which authors and/or types of books do you like to read?

RW: I suspect any answer I might offer to this question will eventually shift, depending on what season it’s proposed in, in what year I might encounter it. But despite a book like Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife being so eloquently complicated and eye-opening for me, it’s poetry that seems to continue to be what I’m drawn to reading no matter what.

Rob Winger on poetry:

There’s something urgent and clear, there, that I tend not to find in other sorts of work that have other intentions in mind. So Dionne Brand, again, is right, for me, when she writes (again in The Blue Clerk) that “the metaphor is an aggressive attempt at clarity not secrecy.” I’ve really found that to be true in a book like Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong or The Carrying by Ada Limón or various works of both poetry and non-fiction by Matthew Zapruder, stateside. Same goes for recent books by Diane Seuss and lots of other folks. And I had a few years, there, when I started each morning reading just one poem by Mary Oliver, too – not a bad practice for opening up each new day.

In recent years, I’ve also been spending time with different kinds of non- fiction, too, often books that pitch out and forget about the categorial limits of where the books are shelved or what official labels they’re given atop their barcodes. The books of the great Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje first introduced me to that sense of the hybrid and the mongrel; and, in recent years, re-reading the essays of Adrienne Rich or a wonderfully varied book like Jordan Abel’s Nisgha also offers me that sense of clarity within the poetic that I keep on returning to as a reader. There are others, too, including Naomi Klein’s most recent, the fantastic baseball essays by fiction writer Andrew Forbes, this fantastic old book about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge (called The Great Bridge), but if I start listing all of these I won’t be able to stop.

Read with attention to be a better writer

OCW: What advice/guidance would you give to writers?

RW: I tend to respond to this question, normally, by quoting other folks who offer the sorts of advice I’ve found useful. There’s so much advice out there, after all, including that old chestnut that seems to me to be bulletproof: if you want to write better, you have to read – and you have to read with attention. You wouldn’t invite an electrician into your house to take care of the wiring if they had no idea how a current works, right?

Another piece of advice I’ve shared with many students over the past couple of years strikes me as just as essential as any other I’ve encountered, too. This one is from the American short story writer George Saunders, and it allows for the curiosity, wonder, awe, and sharing I find so essential for so much of the writing life. Here’s what Saunders says (in his book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain) to all of us thinking about taking our own efforts seriously as writers: “The closest thing I have to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.”

And another one! This time from the writer Jessica Westhead, offered at a reading one time in response to this kind of question (about offering advice to writers) from a member of the audience: “don’t be a jerk,” she told them. A solid recommendation! Finally, if you haven’t read it, I also can’t say enough about Workbook: Memos and Dispatches On Writing by the late Steven Heighton. That slender little book is jam-packed with all kinds of good thinking about what it might mean to do this sort of work.

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

RW: No, honestly, neither. But also, under certain conditions in certain times and places, of course, my answer could also be yes and both. It depends, for me, on how it’s used and why – and it’s therefore no different, for me, than asking about any other tool or new invention. My sense is that there will always be people who are excited about making and sharing things and that there will always be art no matter what awful fascisms take over in certain times and places.

So I tend to think that whatever new technology late capitalism is presenting to us right now is just another iteration of same old selfish garbage that capitalists always present to everyone. Does that make it inherently bad, I wonder? Or is it kind of neutral? Is that naïve? Am I able to ask these sorts of things because I’m rolling around in privilege and luck? That might be true!

I hope, of course, that it’s not just blindness that’s letting me think this way but, instead, something adjacent to a species of hope or possibility that I’m registering, here, despite my frequent grumpiness. This sort of query always seems to me to be a question, after all, that asks us whether or not we truly, deep down, really believe in people or not. And situating with care and some semblance of wisdom any precise response to that sort of lifelong query, I’m afraid, is maybe a bit above my pay grade.