Gerard Beirne: Kerry Lee, you were born in Montreal but have lived in many parts of the world and studied Medieval Renaissance Literature at Cardiff University. When I first met you, we were both living in New Brunswick on the east coast on Canada but like myself, you’ve moved again. Can you update us on where you are living now?

Kerry-Lee Powell: I moved to London in November. I’d planned to get a place in Wales, where my family lives. But the lockdown froze me, like everyone else, in amber. At the moment I’m living in the attic of a friend’s dance studio, and the sound of tango music drifting down from below, when dancers come to practice alone, adds a poignant note of lovelier times.

GB: In New Brunswick, there was a small but vibrant writing community of which we were both a part. How important is this sense of a writing community to you? Do you need it or can you get along just fine without it?

KP: The whole idea of community feels a bit like a lost Atlantis at the moment! In New Brunswick, there was always a feeling of contingency and isolation, kinships forged by the sprawling forest plantations and harsh weather. I spent my last days there in a ‘bubble’ of wonderful writer friends and artists. We gathered a few evenings a week around fire pits in back yards and I will treasure those nights full of laughter and intimacy. Then one of us, a gifted and much loved writer named RM Vaughan, took his own life. There were days of searching and desperation until he was found in the woods, and then enormous grief. The end of an era.

GB: You came to prominence quickly with your debut poetry collection being published by Biblioasis Press in 2014 and your short story collection, Willem de Kooning's Paintbrush, published by HarperCollins in 2016 (nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and shortlisted for the 2016 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and Governor General’s Award for English Language Fiction). How was your experience of this? Did it impact your writing in any way?

KP: It was exhilarating and terrifying. I didn’t anticipate how exposed and vulnerable the process of publishing would make me feel. I felt also that perhaps readers may have been drawn to the book because of its nominations alone. I correctly guessed that some of these readers would be a little unsettled by the more unwholesome or unrelenting aspects of the book! But it felt good to know that I was being as true to myself as I knew how to be at the time.

GB: As mentioned above, you have published both poetry and fiction. Are you comfortable working between both and how do you manage that process? Do you have a preference for either form?

KP: I feel that poetry and short fiction have more in common than short fiction and novels, and I like to shape my paragraphs with the same sense of attention to detail that I might a poem. In general, I have a preference for form! Thinking about what shape a piece of writing might take, how it should live in the world, is really vital to my process. Sometimes I will feel that a story should be cinematic or unfold in a more traditional narrative sense. Sometimes a story should be disorienting. A loose poem might secretly prefer to be a sonnet. And vice versa!

GB: Are you writing at the moment?

KP: I’m under contract to finish a novel for HarperCollins, the publishers of my story collection.

GB: Which writers/books have influenced you most?

KP: The writers who made me want to write when I was a young adult. I loved Orwell because of his steady gaze and the fact that his moral fastidiousness didn’t prevent him from bravely playing the devil’s advocate. I loved Truman Capote’s imaginative lyricism, Sylvia Plath’s grace and intensity, Nabokov’s patrician elegance and hilarious pyrotechnics. I loved Kafka and Camus. Samuel Beckett was also a huge influence, and I’m grateful that he allowed me to see a kind of tragic absurdity in the people I encountered as a young teen adrift in less-than-ideal circumstances.

GB: Obviously, these are difficult times with the pandemic and the various levels of lockdown. How has this impacted you and your writing?

KP: Perhaps we writers are better equipped to deal with lockdown than many others. I have a rich dream world that I often retreat to. Like many, I’m curious that I haven’t been writing as much as I thought I would. Being in London now makes me far more aware of what might be lost to the world, when I think of all the music, the dance, the closed theatres. But I really do believe that artists are brave and ingenious. I have hope!

GB: Any words of advice for beginning and emerging writers?

KP: I teach Creative Writing, and I place a great deal of emphasis on form and on craft. We live in a world that is jam-packed with stories, from Instagram to TV soaps to celebrity rags. What can literary fiction do that other forms can’t? I want my students to really think about why they love the stories that they do. Often, students will pick out a single sentence in a favorite story and say ‘This. This one sentence said everything and changed the way I saw things.’ That’s the power that a few well-chosen words can have. I encourage them to write with passion and confidence. Good writing requires love. A deep and meaningful engagement with one’s angels and one’s demons.