Excerpt from an Interview with the Poet Russell Thornton

The Ormsby Review publishes mostly book reviews, sometimes interviews. The passage below is from Russell Thornton (b. 1959), a North Vancouver-born poet who has travelled widely and is now living once more on the North Shore. On the occasion of his latest book, Answer to Blue (2021), he is asked, "How has B.C. been for you personally and creatively during the last two years of the pandemic?" and his reply entered my system like a Netflix synopsis. 

"My mother had been staying with us (two adults and two young kids) in a two-bedroom apartment for the ten months before the pandemic hit. She was dying of cancer. So I had been in a stressful situation for a while when the pandemic hit. Then my mother died. Then I was taken up with two jobs, one of which I now did at home, and having kids at home sitting at my computer doing their grade 2 and 6 schoolwork via Microsoft Teams (or was it Zoom?). I had to keep my son from constantly typing snarky comments to his classmates. I’d see my daughter listening to music, writing stories, doing art, and texting friends while pretending to pay attention to her teacher delivering the day’s math lesson on the screen. The nice thing was that for a period there, the streets were empty, and my kids and I went on walks every evening. Other than that little blessing, the first year of the pandemic was a tense, wrenching time for me, as it was for many, many people. When my kids got back to in-person instruction, there were several cases of Covid at their school. My usual worrywart parental concern increased, that’s for sure. I had to make sure an elderly aunt of mine, who lives on her own and whom I see every day, stayed isolated. I watched as the isolation advanced her into dementia. On the “creative” front, not much changed for me except my writing locales. I used to go to public libraries to try to write for an hour or so a day on weekdays. I did whatever reading I wanted to do in my car in increments while waiting to drive my kids home from school and activities. When the libraries (and shopping mall food courts) closed, I did both reading and scribbling in my car. The more kid transportation I had to do, the better for me, as it turned out!"