above/ground press author spotlight #20 : Pearl Pirie

, celebrating her seventh title from above/ground press,

Pearl Pirie is an Ottawa-area, rural Quebec writer. She has been lucky enough to have had four poetry collections published, most recently footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). She has published phafours press since 2007. She is the coordinator for Haiku Canada’s Betty Drevniok Award for haiku (Contest opens Dec 15-Feb 28: https://forms.gle/jRKX4NEGkJgg1pqG7). You can find her at Patreon and at www.pearlpirie.com

Pearl Pirie is the author of seven titles through above/ground press: the oath in the boathouse (2008), vertigoheel for the dilly (2014), today’s woods (2014), sex in sevens (2016), Eldon, letters (2019), Rushing Dusk (2024) and Heat Lamp (2026). Report from the Pirie Society, Vol. 1 No. 1, appeared in 2023.

You’ve now published seven chapbooks with above/ground press, as well as multiple chapbook titles across other publishers.

Yes, I believe Heat Lamp is my 40th single-author chapbook. I love how far & wide you distribute with above/ground.

How do you see your work progressing between titles?

Ideas used to have to leak around edges. I cut myself off from myself, could only get past my inner barriers obliquely. Writing was marked by play but driven by resistance and escape. A tension between wanting to be heard and not wanting repercussions of speaking.

As a trend, I’m returning to vulnerability, going deeper rather than broader, weighing what is salient, and why, instead of the headlong I used to do.

How do you see your chapbooks in terms of your larger work?

Chapbooks are like mice and a book is feline. Chapbooks are more mobile and can get into improbably small spaces. Through the tiniest crack. They don’t ask for as much in time, resources, or money. They seem cute as they patrol perimeters, climb walls but leap ways you may not expect. (It’s untested whether chapbooks can be attracted and live trapped with peanut butter. I doubt it but impossibilities are useful to think about.)

As Rebecca Solnit said in Hope in the Dark: “the impossible happened time and again by people imagining that the status quo was not inevitable or eternal and showing up to do the work to make it so.”

Which reminds me of Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal saying, “compassion recognizes that the seemingly impossible only seems so, and that whatever we most need and long for can actualize at any moment. Staying open to possibility doesn’t require instant results. It means knowing that there is more to all of us, in the most positive sense, than meets the eye.”

Writing is imagining other selves, other ways of opening understanding. That’s the larger work.

Were your titles deliberately composed as chapbook-sized units, or part of larger, book-length manuscripts?

Ideally I’d go from poems to magazines, accumulate credits to chapbook, accumulate chapbooks to book, accumulate those to a selected. But as Han VanderHart said in a reading chapbooks are good for poems that are adjacent to books but don’t quite fit but have their own things to say. (I paraphrase: Han said it better).

Most started as either a poem that got out of hand and ended at chapbook length, or a book that was 2-5 book manuscripts culled back to what was good, and interesting, leaving only a few pages.

I particularly admire minimalist poets and haiku poets for an exacting reduction. At a blog post,

> Around 17 years in the making, the haiku in this book were culled from a few thousand fragments written between 2008-2019, and edited down to around 1000 ku between 2016-2020. This was further whittled to 200 ku earlier this year—newly edited and sequenced-representing what I consider to be the absolute best.

—Dick Whyte, Same Old Moon New Haiku Book Release!!!!

This work distilling seems more likely to end up with a thin book of keepers that more people hear and feel. That said, it isn’t always a bigger audience that’s needed, but a rarely reached resonance with those weird, curious, traumatized in comparable ways. You can take more risks in a chapbook.

Because I write using a lot of styles, themes, with varied contents & forms, it can take a while to accumulate any pieces that fit together. Like healing, work isn’t linear but incremental. I like things that cohere but a crazy quilt of diverse poems is fine too.

Some chapbooks are units to test the larger piece. This one, Heat Lamp, is a thought experiment enough itself, with a third of what I tried, seeming to have legs. We’ll see what people think.

I like the idea of poems “that get out of hand.” How deliberately does writing emerge, then?

I deliberately write/forage. What latches and catches and seems yessss can’t be predicted until it has. When it gets out of hand it tickles me enough that I suppose it creates dopamine. It changes something even if in the part of the brain and body that is hard to measure.

When I can dive into a longer flow state (getting out of hand, like vertigoheel for the dilly or today’s woods) is it a poem worth sharing? I think so. Either way it is useful for having done it. When I want to toss it to people it doesn’t seem to duplicate what I’ve read and adds something to the conversation.

Do poems occur that eventually get grouped together or begin to cluster?

Occasionally, as for Heat Lamp, the poems are pursuing one idea as an exploration or leading question over a few months and the previous two I just mentioned. .

More often? What comes, comes. Day to day is not Project Poems, but I do have 4 projects each with central focus to understand. I am getting in the habit of tagging in the drafts files if it seems it might fit one of the dozen manuscripts accumulating or if its a form I might cluster.

I let in any poems that will have me. All that rises I trust becomes salient for a reason.

The long game is a game. I trust a process of not shutting myself down. My old training led to scathing, hectoring, reductionist inner critic. I have a habit of undercutting any emotion, to not let a mood or subject build in a book. Book structure as trauma response. I’m looking to give myself permission to unshield. By composing I am resisting, rewriting neural pathways, reforming rules for the hostile inner protector, practicing a kind of active listening, a respect for selves that have been.

Oh my, that was long. Interesting question.

How deliberately does writing happen?

I set aside time each morning (often the whole morning) for thinking/writing, listening before the day “starts.” And, while waking with hot flashes and when walking the dog, it’s something to do—I can roll around rhythms, refine lines, leave gaps of not being too busy.

Busy can be avoidance so I try to catch myself from filling myself with distractive noise unthinkingly. It doesn’t all have to be poems. That’s another way work ethic says I have to justify my existence, earn the right to breathe...I am a maker but there are so many constrictive rules to question and rewrite. We all drink the capitalist koolaid that wants us to convert hours into dollars to get a ROI. As if poems owe us something more than their existence. As if we owe something more than ours.

I am an archivist by nature as a form of love. I capture what strikes me through the day, whether from reading or observations, experiences, contemplation or conversation. I go rigid like an Irish setter pointing and Bri asks, is there something you need to write down? He’s observant like that. :)

Afternoons are for editing when energies and schedule allow. Evenings have reading.

I get the sense that you regularly listen for the accident, open to allowing the unexpected in, probably more than most. Is that a fair assessment?

Fair. I believe one can’t step outside poetry any more than you can step outside physics, chemistry, or electricity.

I believe in chance and chaos, in being open to cross-pollination. Stephanie Anne at the small press fair had her new horror novel Modern Hauntings and one phrase about diverse groups popped out like a billboard: “We fill each others blind spots to maximize our chances.”

From your unique perspective of all you are all all you’ve lived and learned, you can see what I don’t, and by connections with people unlike us we are all safer when we look for one another.

You mention that Heat Lamp “sprung from the forehead of Gary Barwin’s anus porcupine eyebrow.”

At least one of us should, for sure.

What was it about Barwin’s sequence that prompted your own explorations?

I think it was the third or fourth read that did it. I mean, each time delighted. We think of the alphabet as a means to convey symbolic importance but he inverts that. What if the letters were the symbols and objects to unpack?

His chapbook (from Paper Kite Press, 2009), tickled. It made me laugh, gave me goosebumps, gave me considering pauses. It shows how poetry is cognitive deep level, not only story, sounds and rhythm play, but at a concept level, seeing.

Each line is a character redefined and the juxtaposition among them made a full kind of sonnet effect in a few characters. It is the very practice of the principle “see freshly”.

I know you’ve utilized specific works by others as prompts to respond to. What is it about this kind of work that appeals to you?

Nothing starts from nothing. I suppose it boils down to a paper equivalent of hyperlinking Wikipedia. May as well start with something someone has put care and attention into. Like my cento chapbook of Phil Hall’s lines (we scrawl our likenesses (phafours, 2023)), or the cento chapbook of your lines, (rob, plunder, verse (Battleaxe, 2018)). Or any epigraphs. It hat tips what inspires. Having once been a teacher I feel if I learn or discover something of value I pay for that debt and honour that opportunity by spreading the knowledge.

No one is a discrete individual. When there’s someone on the paths who knows more, or better, point to them and acknowledge them.

In this way, your work seems very much a variation on how Robert Kroetsch termed it, how literature is a conversation. Is that how you see your writing as well?

I hope to display an analogous sense of humour to Kroetsch. He had a real twinkle.

I hope it to be a conversation. Admittedly it’s a terrible way to go about it, with turn taking being book length, and having a pay wall. And it isn’t well-structured for interjections, is it?

Except for readings I suppose. I love the breath changes in a room, the small voluntary or involuntary noises. It’s so rare in life to have shared experience/focus.

Feels at odds with Phil Hall who recently wrote,

“I hate it when I’m giving a reading and someone in the audience makes that little moaning sound.

As if life were cute and thoughtful. That’s what failure sounds like.”

https://periodicityjournal.blogspot.com/2025/12/phil-hall-talking-of-duncan-by.html?m=1

But then, I get what he’s saying. Poems as pat, pandering papercut, expected, are shuddery.

Affirming can be part of poetry but I mean, if it’s known, why are we saying it? Echo chambers are safety but also dangerous. Shouldn’t we question, admit, interrogate, posit, explore? Yes, a bullseye is nice, to create a space for resonance but but. I like the ambiguous, grey, mutually exclusive but overlapping.

Always there’s that push pull tension, to share, without performing but to perform enough to be understood. To reflect but not get lost in abstractions, to be concrete but not break a foot dropping a heavy poem.

Maybe writing is a substitute for rewarding conversations, a message in a bottle to people who need that particular message, or that bottle to prop up a drooping shelf.

There’s certain arguments to be made for poetry as therapy, as self-expression, as pathology, as a way to be in the world, as a means of thinking or as opting in to cultural reform for justice, to be audible and credible despite being slotted as female, and I think, read as neurodiverse, a term I like better than neurodivergent since divergent implies away from a norm, like straight implies gay being crooked.

I suppose writing is what it is. Paper and ebooks can access times, places and people I do not, being largely a hermit. But publishing is for solidarity with people who want to see their comparable brains and ideas or possibilities reflected. Connection. As adrienne maree brown said in emergent strategy “we are in an imagination battle” for how our world will be. we can terraform as a community though poetry.