Gathering Feathers

Ben Rawluk

I am very deliberate in the morning. I pick out my outfit—bright colours, bright pinks and blues—and trim my beard. I take the puppy outside for her walk. I am always anxious until she shits, always worried about her being uncomfortable or anxious or losing control inside. Today she goes on the stretch of grass next to a condo building's water feature—the ducks can be found there. She shits—but as I reach down to bag it, she gets the zoomies, racing around me and tying me in knots. A seagull shits on my head.

The herons are screaming. They are saying no and fuck you while an eagle swoops down to steal their eggs. They are saying we will kill you, we will kill your mother. The people are not screaming. They are running, eating, playing bocce. They are smiling, making conversation, but they are brittle. They are trying to have a good time in the midst of a massacre.

A muster of peacocks and peahens has been making its way through the neighbourhood. When I leave the house in the morning to trudge to Starbucks for hot chocolate and lemon loaf, they are waiting for me—ten or twelve of them, hovering in the front yard and the driveway. They migrate slowly, indolently, not bothering to wave and smile awkwardly at drivers who slow down to let them cross the street. They are iridescent assholes.

It is easy to become a bird. First, gather feathers. You will have to work with what you can find. Start right outside your front door: crow, seagull, heron, peacock. Follow them, like a trail, into the woods. Use chicken wire to tie them to your clothes. Don't worry about consistency or aerodynamics or fashion; birds are slapdash by nature. Practice your bird calls as you go. The most important thing is to learn how birds curse.

Interview by C. VanWinkle
March 29, 2024

What was the prompt that you responded to?

It was a series of textile pieces that looked like fashion design with a lot of bright colors. A dress, a hoodie with “B FREE” on the back, some really nice boots. It was a really interesting, eclectic grouping of clothing. Blues, reds, and purples. And there was a heavy bird theme. There were feathers and some other bird pieces in there.

What did you think of it? What was your initial reaction?

When I first looked at it, it gave me a weird Frida Kahlo vibe. I also found that there was this conflict between joy and violence going on in it, which is interesting because I don't think it was intentionally violent. It was very frenetic with the colors and the way they were assembled. The way the color was applied to the fabric was chaotic in a particular way that felt violent. Naturally violent, not intentionally violent. You know, bird violence.

I've never heard anyone describe something as “naturally violent” and I think that's really interesting.

Yeah, it was probably one of the most emotionally intense outfits I've ever seen, if that makes sense.

I think that's a good way to put it. It is intense! How did you decide what to do with it? Can you tell me how you got started?

When I'm responding to a prompt, I have to stop and throw out any of my immediate reactions if they're connected to long-term themes of mine, if I'm putting too much of myself into the piece that I'm looking at. So I had to throw out some things. Then I fixated on a splash of purple that felt like a tropical bird. It looked like wings and a beak connected to each other. I really fixated on that, and it became the starting point for me.

So you were thinking birds, you were thinking chaos, you were thinking violence.

Yeah. I went back and forth. I was thinking that I could do a fiction piece or I could do a poem, and it ended up feeling more poetic to me. That's the feeling I was getting, very poetic. Often when I write poetry, I have a jumble of ideas and images that click together slowly. I tend to think of poetry writing as assembling a puzzle out of disparate pieces, and that's what this was leading me to. I had all of these bits and pieces, images that weren't really fully connecting, but I could assemble them. I thought that there are lots of birds in my life; all the birds in the poem are birds in my immediate vicinity. I just assembled these moments and then moved things around. I was trying to get that growing sense of natural violence that the prompt evoked for me. I wanted to start with that. The color in the piece, too. The peacock came to me first because they’re so colorful and they're sort of unique to my area. I'm in Canada, but I’m right across from the biggest park in the city and it's got a petting zoo, so there are always peacocks everywhere. And they’re little fuckers. That was my starting point, and then other birds accumulated as I went.

Are a lot of the moments in this piece from personal experience?

I like stringing together these autobiographical pieces, even if they're not my stories per se. These are all mine, but in other poems I tend to take these images that I've heard of or I know about and then I string them together. I like doing a leap between stanzas, not trying too hard to draw a formal connection between them. I just let the reader move through it and know that they're not necessarily narratively tied together, but they're jumping between moments. But in this case, all of it came from my life essentially.

And that’s a device you use often?

Yeah, fairly often with poetry. In fiction too, to some extent. I take things and then run them through a prism. Maybe that’s an easy way of thinking about my poetry. It's usually like I'm sending an image through a prism and it's fracturing, and then I’m trying to stitch the fractures back together – which is like three metaphors happening at once, but sure.

[laughs] We love a mixed metaphor. So how else does this piece relate to the rest of your work?

I’ve written a whole set of poems that are stylistically quite similar to this, in terms of that fracturing element. I do love a violent bird. And particularly clusters of animals. One of my stories is about a guy who gets a sexually transmitted plague of frogs, so there's always this cluster of frogs floating around him. I tend to have a plague thing. I was raised extremely agnostic, but I have a biblical plague theme flung through a lot of my work, and I think this picked up on that as well. This cluster of things that you have no control over, that is impinging on you.

I haven't read much of your work, but that tracks. You're not afraid to get fanciful and it's often to the detriment of the characters.

Yeah, I like to torture my characters with whimsy.

It didn’t occur to me until my second read of this piece that these must be local birds to where you live. Do you think your location has a large influence on your writing?

Yes. I think I'm in a transitional period with that though because I lived on the mainland in Vancouver, which is a much bigger city than I am in now. I had a whole string of stories set in Vancouver. Now I'm transitioning into Victoria and I think the setting of my writing is slowly shifting. It's been interesting because it’s almost me processing my relocation.

How do you like working from a prompt?

I definitely do. When I was in grad school, we used to do these postcard story writing parties. We would give everyone a line and we’d all have to write postcard stories. I definitely write from prompts quite often, usually just to get myself rolling on something.

I love it. I love a prompt.

I thought it was interesting to write from a different medium. Typically, when I'm responding to prompts, it's other pieces of writing. I found that I had to work differently to navigate that. As I said, I have to throw out a lot of my own my natural tendencies, my themes that percolate too often. Actually, it was more like I had to make sure I wasn't using this as an excuse to write something I was already thinking about, that I was purely responding to the piece. I found that slightly more challenging with a different medium than another piece of writing, because it's a totally different language than I'm used to working in. I was looking at it very differently.

Oh that’s true. It’s a whole different exercise for your brain.

As a writer, I think that when you're working from a prompt like this, a totally different kind of art, there's a tendency to want to do a photograph poem or something. You know, where you just describe the image. I think getting out of that head space was very important, to try and find a narrative within the piece, even though the piece doesn’t have an actual narrative element in any way.

I have one more question for you. What advice would you have for a new person who’s just getting their prompt today?

Look at it and step away from it. Then, look at it again and see what has changed for you about it. I definitely notice things differently or respond differently after I’ve gone away and come back to it. Don't look at it once; look at it multiple times with new eyes.

Call Number: G120VA | G121PP.raGa

Ben Rawluk is a white settler Canadian and queer writer of fiction and poetry living on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the lək̓ʷəŋən people (Victoria BC). A graduate of the University of British Columbia's MFA Creative Writing program, his work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Plenitude and Cosmonauts Avenue, among others.