Biography
Elizabeth Philips is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Torch River. In 2015, she published her first novel, The Afterlife of Birds, winner of the City of Saskatoon Book Award and a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. She is the former editor of Grain magazine, and the former director the Banff Centre’s Emerging Writers Intensive. She is the Acquisition Editor for Thistledown Press and she lives in Saskatoon.
Micro-interview
Yes. I loved the poem, "The Swimmer's Moment," by Margaret Avison.
I began writing poetry at the age of 16. I think I began thinking of myself as a poet at 17.
I think a poet's job is to write about insights and images and events and beliefs and condense them into powerful, beautiful, hair-raising language that takes readers down into those lived moments.
I wrote Jacknife/2 inspired by memories of a childhood in which I was a girl who liked to play sports with boys, who challenged the roles girls were expected to play, and what that felt like.
The Tree by Rina Lasnier, because it is so simple and yet so powerful. and because I am pretty much obsessed by trees and their role in our lives, and in the life of our planet.