Just One Question for Camilla Gibb — THE NEEDLE AND THE KNIFE

Author Camilla Gibb, Photo by Mark Raynes Roberts

As an undergraduate at UofT, I had the privilege of participating in a short story workshop led by bestselling author Camilla Gibb. You had to apply to get into the class, and I was over the moon the day I opened the email telling me I’d been accepted. I immediately bought and devoured her bestselling novel Sweetness in the Belly. By the time I finished, I was in the midst of a full-blown panic attack. There was no way I could expose my melodramatic, amateurish stories to anyone who could write something so brilliant. I briefly considered bailing on the class, but eventually sucked up my courage and went ahead. I’m so glad I did. Camilla was an excellent teacher, and I learned a lot during those magical evening sessions with her. More than that, she offered me the encouragement I needed to take myself seriously as a writer. It was a big deal.

In the two decades since, I’ve followed Camilla’s work with great interest. She’s produced an impressive body of work that is consistently celebrated for its honesty, immersiveness, and ambitious scope. Earlier this year, I was excited to learn a new book was on its way, in which Gibb would combine poetry and collage. As a picture book writer, I’m always interested in the relationship between word and image, and the complex, sometimes contradictory ways the two can dance together to shape our experience of a text.

When I Used to Be a Pisces landed in my mailbox a few ago, I inhaled it one sitting then immediately read it again, slowly this time, piece-by-piece. Here was the same careful, relentless probing into questions of family, love, home, belonging one finds in much of Camilla’s work, but distilled into a series of sharp, taut, clear-eyed pieces that seem to hum, like a plucked string. Moving back and forth through time, the narrator compels us to consider what seeds we carry forward from our childhoods into the selves and families we create as adults. These are poems you feel in your body— visceral, smelling of soil and lake water, full of both heartache and hope. I can't wait for readers to experience them.

Camilla Gibb’s firs poetry collection, *I Used to Be a Pisces,* is available now from Book*Hug Press.

Q/ I’ve long been an admirer of the collage work you’ve share on Instagram. On a platform that feels less and less like a vehicle for meaningful human connection and visual inspiration, your dreamy, surreal images never fail to command my attention. Each individual piece is striking, but viewed collectively on your grid, their resonance increases.

In this new book, you combine several of these collages with a collection of equally remarkable poems. Can you speak a little bit about the process of bringing together image and text? Did they develop in tandem, or did one proceed the other? Why did this feel like the right approach for this particular project?

A/I wrote poetry as a child and a teen. I collaged a lot as a teen, too. Both my parents and my brother were really good visual artists. I was the least adept; I cannot draw or paint. I cannot even draw an accurate drawing of a cat or a strawberry. But I can assemble things—images, words.

I’ve had to ask myself whether the collage and poetry I’ve been doing over the past few years is some kind of return to creative roots. But I think there’s more to it: there are various times in life when you find yourself confronting Big Questions, existential ones about meaning, purpose and place. These hit hard in midlife and they don’t lend themselves to immediate answers.

I found myself exploring more oblique forms of storytelling after twenty-five years of writing novels. None of this was intentional or by design. It started by cutting things out. I seemed to find some joy in a joyless time. This only intensified during the pandemic.

I guess the fish in the bathtub were installation. Impermanent. Likely to be sucked down or just circle the drain if I ever had a bath again. I had intentions of having a bath again. I began to glue things down.

As I carried on, I realized there were thematic preoccupations. Isolation in landscapes. Inheritance and legacy. Human/animal interaction.

On it went. On it goes.

Just before the pandemic, I’d talked to Jay Millar at Book*hug about the possibility of doing something with visual work. I liked what they did with visual imagery in conjunction with text, including working with collage.

The “text” that would accompany the images was uncertain. Over the next three years it emerged as poetry, poetry around similar preoccupations. The poetry and the collage don’t address each other directly, but they seem to echo and bounce off each other, floating around the same space.