A Title Should Be a "Dream in Which the Work Lives": Talking with our February 2019 writer-in-residence Deanna Young

Ottawa poet Deanna Young is the author of four collections of poetry, which have earned her praise and nominations for numerous prizes including the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Ottawa Book Award, and the ReLit Award.

We're very excited to announce that Deanna will be our February 2019 writer-in-residence, bringing her voice to Open Book to discuss poetry, her writing practice, and much more. 

You can get to know her here today - we had the chance to speak with Deanna about her newest collection, Reunion (Brick Books), and the significance of its title. 

She tells us about just who (and what) is being reunited in her collection, the unexpected cartoon character who once provided her with a great title, and the "wide-open evocativeness" of single word titles. 

Open Book:

Tell us about the title of your newest book and how you came to it.

Deanna Young: 

The word “reunion” had been in the back of my mind for years before it found its way to the cover of my book Reunion. It would not be untrue to say that the word was the catalyst for the book. I had long thought about writing about the cast of characters that filled my childhood. My father was the second youngest of 10, and the youngest boy. The Youngs were a wild bunch, prone to drunkenness and conflict, to put it mildly. My mother’s people, by contrast, were United-Church teetotalers, naiveté being their tragic flaw, in my opinion. Once the ash of my childhood had settled, it occurred to me to bring some of these characters together again in a sort of reunion—to what end, I wasn’t sure. The idea gestated for a long time. Then the ghosts started to gather. They came together rather suddenly, in fact. Ultimately, “reunion” also refers to a reintegration or resurrection of the shattered self—which is, of course, an unrealizable ideal. We can try, anyway.

OB:

Where is the most unexpected place you've ever found inspiration for a title?

DY:

How could any place be an unexpected place to find a title for a poem, or for any work of art? I ask rhetorically and in mock consternation. That being said, the poem “And Eyes So Black” in Reunion draws its title from a love poem that Fred Flintstone wrote for his wife Wilma. The original line is “And eyes so black, like frying pans.”

OB:

What, in your opinion, is most important function of a title?

DY:

A title should add a whole other dimension to a work of art. It should be a sort of house or dream in which the work lives.

OB:

What is your favourite title that you've ever come up with and why? (For any kind of piece, short or long.)

DY:

I don’t have a favourite title (nor a favourite child), but one that pops to mind is “Jean Young, Matriarch, Speaks from the Grave”. It’s a poem in Reunion, and most of the poems there have single-word or two-word titles, so this one stands out.

OB:

What is your favourite title as a reader, from someone else's work?

DY:

Again, I have no single favourite, though I quite like Modern and Normal (Karen Solie), Faithful and Virtuous Night (Louise Gluck), and Grief is the Thing with Feathers (Max Porter), to name but a few.

OB:

How do you feel about single-word titles?

DY:

I’m a huge fan of single-word titles, as evidenced by many of the poems in Reunion (“Witness”, “Recrimination”, “Lamb”, etc.). The book title itself is a single word, of course. I like the wide-open evocativeness of the single word. It just sits there and throbs. The reader is offered a talisman, a clue, rather than an arrow pointing in a specific direction.

OB:

Did you consider any other titles for your current book and if so what were they? Why did you decide to go with the title you eventually picked?

DY:

Not even for a second did I consider another title for Reunion, and this was a great relief. For my previous book, I knew House Dreams was the natural, best title (it refers to dreams involving houses), but I worried about misunderstandings (people might misremember it as Dream Houses, for example). At the final hour I tortured myself and my editor trying to come up with another title, only to settle on the true title after all. After that experience I came to Reunion with a hard-earned trust in my instincts.

OB:

What usually comes first for you: a title or a finished piece of writing?

DY:

I’ll often start a poem with a stand-in title, just to get things rolling. I seem to need the anchor that a title provides. (Writing that makes me wonder if I should challenge this practice. Maybe it’s restricting the poems in some way. Hmmm.) I’ll usually tack a working title onto a poem by the end of the first draft, anyway. But often these automatic titles lack power and must be discarded. I’ll end up choosing an unforeseen title, one that surprises me and complicates the poem.

OB:

What quality in a title will consistently make you pick up an unfamiliar book?

DY:

A title hinting at existential or spiritual matters might get me to pick up the book and look inside.

OB:

What are you working on now?

DY:

Very sketchy poems about a city personified and a girl with a strange affliction. I’m very much still feeling my way in the dark of this new mystery.

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Deanna Young’s previous books include House Dreams, nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, the Ottawa Book Award, the Archibald Lampman Award and the ReLit Award, and Drunkard’s Path. Young grew up in southwestern Ontario during the 1970s and ’80s. Reunion, her fourth collection, belongs to that place and time. She now lives in Ottawa, where she works as an editor and teaches poetry privately.