Sharon Berg Interviews ​Renée M. Sgroi 

(Guernica Editions, 2024)

​Renée M. Sgroi 

Sharon Berg:             In a Tension of Leaves and Binding presents a relationship with the flora and fauna of the natural world that reads naturally as a loving relationship. It reminds me of my own observations as a young child. This makes me wonder when you developed your awareness of that level of communication between humans and nature? Did it begin in childhood, or was there a specific incident that laid the ground for that understanding?
 
Renée Sgroi:              I think I’ve always had a natural affinity towards plants which developed into a realization when I was older that I have a proverbial “green thumb”. I’m not sure that I thought of that relationship as a form of communication as a child. Maybe more like an awareness, a paying of close attention.
 
SB:      That’s interesting. I think ‘paying attention’ is part of communication, just as ‘listening’ evokes communication. Several poems in your collection, such as ‘Onions’, personify plants. Others, like ‘you have called me clay’, have soil speaking to the gardener. Giving voice to these elements of our surroundings suggests an ambiguous relationship between humans and nonhuman elements, asking us to consider the possibly that we aren’t the only sentient beings on planet Earth. Yet the general public is schooled to an ambivalent view of the earth processes and the creatures we share Earth with. What would you say to someone who would dismisses the voices in your poems as simple anthropomorphism?
 
RS:      I believe readers should be free to engage with a work (or not) as they wish, so maybe that’s an important thing to say up front. As writers, obviously we have certain ideas about how we’d like the work to be received, but at the same time, we aren’t “owners” of language—language itself is so open, so polyvocal that the idea of “authorial intention” suggests for me that there is only one way to read or interpret or engage with a work, which I find too closed down. I would never want someone to think they couldn’t engage with my work in a way that makes sense to them.
 
That’s a long way of saying that if someone wants to read the work as simple anthropomorphism, then for me, that’s how they see it. But as your question indicates, another way to read those poems is to engage with that relationship between humans and nonhumans, or, perhaps put in a more precise way, the poems ask to us to (re)consider our own perspectives on nonhuman agents, and to revise how we understand ourselves in relation to them. In that sense, it's an important question to ask, and I take (and took) the question very seriously as I was writing the poems. In the West, we’ve lived with and have been taught and in many instances continue to believe this idea that humans and nonhumans should be separated out from one another, with humans somehow “superior”. Of course, we have to ask ourselves why we think that. Are humans somehow better than bees? Or carrots? Or worms? What is it that leads us to think that way? How do we, as humans (recognizing our own limitations), move towards an awareness of ourselves as just another lifeform in the very busy world of plants, and soil, and microbes, and insects, and birds and water and everything that lives and breathes and moves through its own lifespan?
 
As I’ve written and commented elsewhere, my particular approach was to work through these questions as a kind of embodiment—at least, that’s how I see it. We’ll never actually know what it feels like to be a carrot or a bird, but if we can approach that embodiment with our imaginations, what would result? My solution was to write the poems from these voices and their imagined perspectives, but to intentionally situate them in the middle of the page. This was my way of trying to acknowledge the garden’s own voice, and to suggest that humans occupy a space somewhere in the margins. It’s not a perfect solution and it may not please everyone, but then again, I’m not sure that any writer could easily claim they’d write their books exactly the same way if they had to do it all over again. As much as the book is finished, it’s also in many ways unfinished, so the conversations around it are to my mind quite productive.
 
SB:      A challenge to the idea that human beings are naturally superior to other presences in the community living on Earth certainly comes across in this book. One of the things that stands out about In a Tension of Leaves and Binding’s poetry for me is the difference in form from one poem to another. There are many poets whose voice is presented in a similar form, poem to poem, within their books. You seem to have prioritized allowing the poem to shape itself. Can you comment on what guides you in choosing your poetic forms?
 
RS:      I think it’s important for the writer to follow the poem. Many writers talk about this, whether they’re referring to novels, poetry, or whatever. Particularly with poetry, though, I sometimes find that the poem needs time to take shape. It’s as if it has its own life on the page, and it doesn’t always know what it wants to be when it first appears as a line, or a phrase, or even sometimes a whole first draft. So my approach is to let that process unfold in its way and time, and to be the person who notices what it wants to do, and where it wants to go. As such, the form reveals itself to me. At the same time, however, sometimes I think there’s a gut feeling that says: try this as a prose poem, or try this as couplets. Experimentation is not only fun, but it’s also useful, because it can show you different ways to think about a poem. And it may be the case that you eventually go back to the original form you had in mind in any case, but I think here’s something to be gained from trying it another way.
 
SB:      To me, your use of form speaks to a level of ‘listening’ that suggests the importance of ‘paying attention’. To shift topics now, I believe every book takes a stance in the midst of the contemporary social and political concerns it presents. How would you describe the position of In a Tension of Leaves and Binding and its areas of concern in today’s world?
 
RS:      I believe it’s important to recognize that there’s no such thing as apolitical poetry. Even if a poem is meant to be innocuous, and reads like a little rhyme about a soup tureen, for instance, or a poem about your favourite pet, or your car, or about a beloved tree, let’s say, the poem won’t get away from certain class distinctions (for instance, I can’t imagine how a poem about a soup tureen couldn’t be read in terms of class in some way). A poem also emerges from within a certain historical and political moment, and from somewhere in the writer’s own identity and life experience which is also affected by certain historical and political factors that shape the writer and the writing. So, to think about any poem whatsoever as somehow dehistoricized or apolitical seems to me to be quite a fallacy.
 
All of this is to say that I agree with your first statement here, that whether or not the poet realizes it, “Every book takes a stance”. For me, I think the stance In a Tension of Leaves and Binding takes is one about connection. We are connected to the world we live in, but it seems increasingly that we live as if we weren’t. I recognized in writing the book that there was a whole microcosm of life and death in one small backyard garden, and the more I delved into exploring the possibilities there, the more I came up with. The book also recognizes my own settler identity and the fact that I’m not only writing on, but also about Indigenous land, and it engages with questions around Western ideas of “ownership”, as well as questions of language. So there’s politics, there’s thinking about the environment, there’s recognizing the impact of colonialism, and of course, there’s the book’s engagement with grief. We haven’t even touched on that yet.
 
SB:      We may not have talked about grief yet, but it’s so integral to our time on earth that I’m sure that will enter the conversation at some point. Speaking of Earth and our location on it, where do you live? Is it an urban or rural setting? Do you feel there’s anything about the environment surrounding you that impacts your writing? Open spaces? Crowds of people? Please explain how the environment around you affects your approach to writing.
 
RS:      I live outside Toronto, in what is now essentially a suburb of the city, so I’m not exactly surrounded by crowds of people, but I also don’t live in the country (although the commute into the downtown core and back sometimes feels as if I do, if only for the length of time it can often take). My environment affects my writing in the sense that I’m always paying attention to light, to the seasons, the weather and so on, but I think it’s important to stress that I do this anywhere—whether I’m in downtown Toronto, on the subway, on the 10th floor of a city building, or not. Even in the city, it’s easy to notice the leaves changing, or grasses sprouting up through pavement, or snow falling. Light is actually quite important to me. How does that affect my writing? I don’t really know.
 
SB:      Ah, that reminds me of what my friend, the late Cree Elder Pauline Shirt, said about founding her Native Way school in the middle of Toronto—(to paraphrase) that you could always connect to the natural world, even in a sea of concrete and asphalt. That brings me to ask, if you had to describe the primary emotion explored in In a Tension of Leaves and Binding, what would it be? Can you explain why you’ve chosen to focus on it? How close is it to the emotion(s) you deal with personally on the subject of your book?
 
RS:      Grief, for sure. Why did I choose to write about grief? I don’t know that I did. I realized more than halfway through that I was writing about grief. It hadn’t really occurred to me, but then, when I took a step back and looked at what I’d written so far, it was pretty clear. In terms of emotions, if there isn’t some degree of emotional truth in a poem, I think the poem falls flat. We’re all human, we all recognize emotions, we all feel them. We can see and feel emotions in print, too, and I think it brings us closer to the work. If there isn’t some emotional truth there, why are we reading or writing?
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SB:      True. If frustration is an emotion, I think titles are often difficult to come up with, though there are some authors who seem to begin there. What was your experience in developing a title for In a Tension of Leaves and Binding?

RS:      The book started out as a folder labeled “garden poems”, because I realized I was writing quite a lot about the garden. I think the move towards the title came about as I recognized I was playing with ideas of trees and books. Leaves, of course, can also refer to pages within a book, and paper, of course, is made from trees, so there was a really interesting tension for me (pun intended?!) between these words that I managed to hew into a title.
 
SB:      Authors often speak of the necessity of writing multiple drafts for a book. What is your experience? Did the length of the book change dramatically at any point in time after you finished the first draft? Please explain.

RS:      I don’t recall the number of drafts the book went through, and no, I don’t think the length changed dramatically at any point. What did change was focus, and ordering. Nearing the end of the process, I had a kind of revelation of how it should all go together, and then it fell into place after that.

SB:      It sounds like you had some level of awareness of your theme for the book before you developed the title. I wonder, how do you think In a Tension of Leaves and Binding should be assessed for its value to your readers? Does it offer practical points for further exploration? describe an important cultural event? offer a compelling message about social awareness? or does it describe your personal aesthetic?

RS:      Questions of value are really interesting, because what we value changes over time and in relation to how a society is structured. Right now in North America, for instance, poetry seems often to have a hard time being valued in relation to other literary forms, at least if you measure value in terms of book sales within and across the general reading public. At the same time, we seem to be living in a cultural moment when more and more poets are publishing (whether through traditional presses or self-publishing), and people are very interested in learning to write poetry, so I’d say societal interest in poetry more broadly doesn’t seem to be diminishing. I think the more pertinent question for me is whether or not any book should be assessed for its value, and what does that mean, and what would that look like?  But to answer the question of how this particular book should be valued, I suppose I’d have to say that Canadian poetry deserves its space as much as any other literary form within the broader spectrum of Canadian writing.
 
SB:      I certainly agree that Canadian poetry deserves a place in the broader spectrum of Canadian literature. This brings me to my final question for you. If you were asked to name another author’s work that compares to the overall theme in this book, which author and what title would it be? How are your work and that author’s work the same or different?
 
RS:      No two books are alike, and no two voices are alike, so it’s rather a daunting question to ask. However, sophie anne edwards, Kim Trainor and myself recently finished working on two conversations about our respective poetry books (sophie’s Conversations with the Kagawong River and Kim’s A blueprint for survival), all published in 2024. There are amazing resonances across all of our books, and it’s clear in some ways we’re thinking about some of the same questions, but they are absolutely and without a doubt three very different books.
 
SB:      That’s truly interesting as it suggests that conversations between several authors can contain not only recognition of dominant themes—perhaps in this case the theme of ecology—but also a critique and evaluation. This reminds me of the basic components for a community, which implies a gathering and sharing that benefits all, even when elements of critique are involved. Thank you, Renée, for all that you’ve shared in this interview.

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Renée M. Sgroi (she/her) is a poet and educator. Her most recent poetry collection, In a Tension of Leaves and Binding (Guernica Editions), was on the CBC’s 2024 highly anticipated fall poetry books and was shortlisted for a 2025 International Rubery Award. Recent poems have been published in Room, Pinhole Poetry, FreeFall Magazine, yolk literary magazine, and Augur Magazine. A member of The Writers’ Union of Canada, the League of Canadian Poets, the Canadian Authors Association, and an Amherst Artists and Writers Affiliate, Renée offers online poetry workshops and is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry Magazine.

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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 taught in Ontario after studying to become a teacher with a focus on First Nations Education: B.A./Laurentian U.; B.Ed/U of T; M.Ed/York U; and D.Ed/UBC. She received a Certificate in Magazine Journalism from Ryerson U and is an alumni of Humber College’s Writing Program. Sharon founded and operated the international literary E-Zine Big Pond Rumours (2006-2019) and its associated press, releasing chapbooks of Canadian poets as prizes for the magazine’s contests. Her poetry appears as full books with Borealis, Coach House, and Cyberwit, and she has four chapbooks with BPR Press. Sharon’s short fiction is with Porcupine’s Quill, and her nonfiction appears with BPR Press. Her writing appears across Canada, the USA, Mexico, Chile, England, Wales, Netherlands, Germany, Siberia, Romania, India, Persia, Singapore, and Australia. Her 3rd poetry collection Stars in the Junkyard was a Finalist in the 2022 International Book Awards, and her narrative history The Name Unspoken: Wandering Spirit Survival School 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.