Sharon Berg Interviews Courtney Bates-Hardy

(Radiant Press, 2024)

Courtney Bates-Hardy

Sharon Berg:    I want to say that I’m glad to have the opportunity to interview you, Courtney. I found reading your book Anatomical Venus was both disturbing and refreshing, not only because of the theme of your poetry but also because it acts to educate the reader. For instance, the poem Chicken Bone taught me something about my mother’s experience of whiplash from a car accident when I was a child. It helped me to understand her pain retrospectively. Is this sort of learning by the reader some part of your inspiration for writing the book?
 
Courtney Bates-Hardy:    It wasn’t so much that the reader might learn something that drove the writing of this book, but my own frustration and lack of understanding about what I was experiencing. It took over a decade after my first car accident before a myofascial therapist told me that whiplash could cause that lump in the throat sensation I talk about in “Chicken Bone.” I’d been diagnosed with whiplash at least twice by then, and it was surprising that none of my doctors had thought to mention it previously. While I was writing the book, I was becoming increasingly frustrated with feeling like I was “healed” for short periods of time before the pain would come back again. Most of what I was writing was me trying to work out that frustration and figure out why I wasn’t just getting “better.”
 
SB:      Ah, now I understand. Anatomical Venus tells readers you’ve experienced several car accidents. It seems that promoting an understanding of how chronic pain affects the psyche of a person with this diagnosis could be called a theme for the book. Did you plan this theme, or did it evolve during the process of assembling the book? Please comment.
 
CB-H:     The theme evolved while I was writing and assembling the book. It took me a long time to accept I was experiencing chronic pain and disability, so I had to go through that acceptance process before the book really came into focus. It was a disabled friend of mine who was the one to tell me what I was experiencing was chronic pain and disability. I’d always downplayed it to myself because my mom had been dealing with chronic pain for years, and mine wasn’t as bad as hers. I didn’t consider that I was dealing with something similar. I was caught in this cycle of feeling better for a while and then flaring up and blaming myself for not being “healed” yet. Doctors often don’t explain chronic pain to you, so you’re left to figure it out on your own. When I finally decided I was ready to take daily medication to help manage the pain after a disc herniated in my neck, my doctor commented that he couldn’t believe I’d put up with the pain for that long. I had to learn it doesn’t do any good to compare yourself to what others are going through. I also had to learn chronic pain follows this cycle of flaring up and then settling down and figure out how to manage the flare ups as best I could. It wasn’t until I visited a chronic pain clinic, years later, that much of what I had learned piecemeal, a little at a time, was confirmed to me.
 
SB:      You’ve just collected an award from the City of Regina to work on a writing project, and you’ve applied to other prizes. How does it change your approach to writing to know that you’ve already received a level of affirmation for your writing? In other words, will being an ‘award-winning’ author place additional pressure on you?
 
CB-H:     I’m very grateful to have received the City of Regina Writing Award to work on my third collection of poetry about queer identity and placing queerness onto the prairie landscape. I’ve had an eventful few years with coming out as a late-in-life lesbian, becoming polyamorous, discovering I’m neurodivergent, and my long-term partner coming out as transgender. I’ve been writing about these experiences along the way, and I’m looking forward to having some dedicated time to work on this collection thanks to this award. There is a little bit of additional pressure, mainly because there is a timeline associated with the award—it’s meant to allow me three months to work on the manuscript. I’m hopeful it will make the publication process easier this time around, since having an award attached to an unpublished manuscript often means publishers are more interested in the work.
 
SB:      Can you offer an idea of the literary surrounds for Anatomical Venus? What books most impressed you while you were working on it? Were there any live performances/ events that you feel influenced this book?
 
CB-H:     I owe a lot to Joanna Ebenstein’s book, Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death, and the Ecstatic, which taught me about the history of wax anatomical models and includes some incredible photos. The Lady Anatomist by Rebecca Messbarger provided the historical background for the poems about Anna Morandi Manzolini.

I was also very fortunate to visit Guillermo del Toro’s exhibit At Home With Monsters at the AGO while I was writing this book, so del Toro fans will likely notice his influence in several of the monster poems.

There were many other influences on the poems in this book, including TV shows like Penny Dreadful and Hannibal, a number of anatomical artworks, a wound closure manual, and more.

In terms of poetry, I read many books of poetry about others’ experiences with chronic pain and disability. Some of those were Obtain No Proof by Carla Harris, Detailing Trauma by Arianne Zwartjes, Air Salt by Ian Kinney, Side Effects May Include Strangers by Dominik Parisien, Trauma Head by Elee Kraljii Gardiner, and Tell the Birds Your Body is Not a Gun by Rayanne Haines.

Another big influence on the book was Sonya Huber’s Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System. The final poem in the book is heavily inspired by her work. My writing group, The Pain Poets, also takes its name from her book.
 
SB:      Titles are often difficult to come up with though some authors seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for Anatomical Venus?

CB-H:      I went back and forth on titles for this manuscript—for a long time, I was referring to it as Anatomy of a Monster but the more I worked on it, the more I realized that the whole book was an extended metaphor for my body as the Anatomical Venus, so it just made sense to call it that. Thankfully, my publisher agreed!
 
SB:      Is this a book that seemed to fall onto the page quickly, as if it were channelled, or did you need to put a lot of effort into its structure? Was there a developmental process? Please elaborate. 
 
CB-H:      Overall, the book went through some large transformations. I initially had it structured with three separate sections, but when I had a manuscript evaluation done with Jennifer LoveGrove (later my editor), she suggested reworking it to follow a narrative structure. I added the longer prose poems at that point, based on writing I had done immediately following my second car accident, well before I thought to write a whole book of poetry about it. Adding those prose poems provided the much-needed context of my car accidents and subsequent nerve damage.
 
SB:      If there is a part of early drafts that was removed from this book, do you think it offers the starting-off point for another book? Help us to understand your decision to cut it. Was it simply developing in a different direction from the rest of the text?

CB-H:      I removed quite a few poems from this manuscript. Many of them were older monster poems, written when I thought I was writing a book of monster poems. The ones I removed didn’t fit with the overall narrative of chronic pain and the extended metaphor of my body as the Anatomical Venus. It made sense to take them out once I realized the shape the book was taking. Some of the monster poems did stay because they fit with the overall narrative, coming in at certain points to represent what it meant to be disabled, to live with chronic pain, and also what it meant to come out as queer in a more visible way as an adult. I wanted those monster poems to display an empowerment in their monstrosity, as an unapologetic way of being.

SB:      Some books require intensive research of a topic or an historical era or some other aspect of the story. Please describe the most intensive research you did for Anatomical Venus. How far would you travel to conduct research? Have you done most of your research on the internet or through books and printed documents?

CB-H:     I did most of my research through books and the Internet, but I did go to Toronto for the Guillermo del Toro exhibit and some additional research at the Robarts Library. I was very thankful to receive funding from SK Arts in order to do that. I had hoped to go to Italy to see some wax anatomical models in person, but the pandemic hit around the same time, so I made do with others’ photographs.
 
SB:      Readers are often interested in knowing how much of a work is invented and how much is autobiographical. Would you care to share your approach/thoughts on this aspect of your readers’ curiosity?

CB-H:      Poetry is a funny genre this way. When I was in university, we were taught to refer to the voice of a poem as the “speaker” and to separate the art from the author. I was also taught about the death of the author, so I know that once my poems are read by others, they belong to the reader. Readers will often have different interpretations of your work, and it will mean something different to them because of their unique experiences. I relish the idea readers will make these poems their own in that way—now that they’re out in the world, they are for them. As to what is invented and what is autobiographical, there’s a mix in this collection. There are some persona poems, with the monster poems and the Lady Anatomist poems, but there are other poems written in “my” voice. However, I think it’s a bit dangerous to say they’re fully autobiographical because there are always going to be events, feelings, and larger contexts that aren’t included in the poems or could be interpreted differently than I intended. It’s all part of the artistic experience.

SB:      If you were asked to name another author’s work you feel compares to the overall theme in this book, which author and what title would it be? How are they the same or different?

CB-H:      I’d highly recommend Tea Gerbeza’s How I Bend Into More, which is a long poem about the author’s experience with scoliosis. The entire book is scored through with a dotted line—like a spine—and it employs some really innovative ways to write the body onto the page.
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SB:      Thanks so much, Courtney. It has been a learning experience, once again, to talk to you about Anatomical Venus. Let me end by wishing you the best with your future writing projects and dealing with the monster born out of your car accidents.

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​Sharon Berg attended the Banff School of Fine Arts Writing Studio in 1982 and was accepted to Banff’s Leighton Artist Colony in 1987. She is also an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. She did her B.A. in Indigenous Studies at Laurentian U, followed by her B.Ed for Primary Education at U of T. Her M.Ed focused on First Nations Education at York U, and her D.Ed focused on Indigenous Education at UBC. She also received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, which released chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. She's published five full books and three chapbooks, working in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work appears in periodicals across Canada, the USA, Mexico, the UK, the Netherlands, India, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard (Cyberwit 2020) was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School (Big Pond Rumours Press 2019) won a 2020 IPPY Award for Regional Nonfiction. When she retired from teaching, she opened Oceanview Writers Retreat in Charlottetown (Terra Nova National Park) Newfoundland.