“… I was lucky to have a family who nurtured my creative pursuits.”
Safety Razor (Gordon Hill Press, 2023)
Could you tell us a bit about your growing up and your path to becoming a writer?
I grew up in a home of intensely quiet people who were generally engaged in their own intellectual pursuits. I only intuited how unusually quiet my home was when friends would visit and ask, “Do we have to whisper in your house?” My mother was a writer who had done a PhD in Modern American Poetry, and she filled our home with literature. My father was an Economics professor who loved history and electronics and filled the house with books on those subjects. My brother is nine years older than I and a brilliant mathematician, and he patiently chatted with me about numbers and the universe. My sister is two years older than I and we were an inseparable unit: when we weren’t attending music or dance lessons, we spent most of our time wandering the city or the countryside around London, Ontario, dreaming up other worlds and looking for “magic.” Since I was probably five years old I dubbed myself a writer and I was lucky to have a family who nurtured my creative pursuits.
What’s the oldest poem in your book? What do you remember about writing it?
The oldest poem is called “Sharp parables.” One sentence came to me suddenly in 2013 when I was in a place of uncertainty. I had just finished my PhD at Cambridge and was packing to leave the UK, not sure of what I was going to do next, when my grandmother in Vermont died. I rushed to the funeral in Vermont during a terrible snowstorm; many family members were in attendance who I hadn’t seen in years. Afterwards, I decided on a whim to return with my sister to Maui, where she lives. I remember lying in the brilliant sun, thinking about family members who had passed away and the difficulty of that Vermont winter, and also thinking I hadn’t written a poem in years because I had been so consumed with my PhD. And then these lines came to me suddenly: “In winter we moved whisper-dust rumours, of wakes under deep prison glass, the lake’s keeping.” And as I built a poem around these lines, it became about the death of a young family member when I was a teenager – I remember the feeling of the death was like a drowning in a winter lake. To read the poem now is more troubling, because years after I wrote it, another family member took their life by drowning in a lake.
A question from Leona Sevick: Do you ever find yourself hiding something in plain sight in your work? What is it? (Don’t tell if you’re still hiding it!)
Humour! Some people pick up on it and others don’t. I was pleased when a review of Safety Razor in fillingStation magazine noted that the poems are often darkly humorous.
A question from Noreen Ocampo: What is something that fuels you as a writer, your writing practice, or just you as a human being?
Sugar. I regret taking a blood test recently and finding out my blood sugar is too high.
A question from Cathy Ulrich: What is the last dream you remember having? Do you remember the feeling your dream-self had while you were in that world?
I love this question, because growing up my sister and I made a practice of sharing our dreams every morning and now my husband and I do the same. Last night I dreamed that I was on a road trip with my husband and kids, and we were meant to be meeting with my parents. Somehow as we drove, we got transported back to the 1980s although everything in our car was still from 2024, and I was super worried about how we would connect with my parents because even if we texted them with our iPhones they wouldn’t have mobile phones yet. And I was like, how will we pay for stuff with our plasticized bills? Will people think it’s weird that our kids are strapped into car seats? And then I realized that if it’s the 80s I wouldn’t necessarily be born yet or I’d just be a baby and that would complicate meeting my parents. All worked out in the final scene of the dream, where we met with my parents in a retro-style motel and had a lovely visit and my husband successfully fixed a broken air conditioning unit.
A question from Amy Barnes: What is your favorite fairy tale and how would you modernize it?
It may not be my “favourite,” but Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Story of a Mother” has haunted me since becoming a mother and understanding the lengths I would go to and sacrifices I would make in order to keep my children well and safe. It’s a harrowing tale about a mother trying to take her dead child back from Death. The ending is as uncomfortable as the tale, when the mother is presented with the possibility that her child comes back to life but potentially endures a life of misery. The mother chooses not to inflict that possibility on her child. This question, of choosing to end life or continue in a life of pain, is obviously a pressing one for many people right now, and I think this tale could be modernized to bring a compassionate view of the emotions people experience as they walk through these decisions or stay beside their loved ones during them.
A question from Monic Ductan: Who are your literary heroes? Why?
A.S. Byatt, for writing prose which startles with its brilliance, sophistication, and humanity. John Donne, for combining the sacred and the sexy and for being able to incorporate so many ideas into a sonnet without sacrificing readability. Stephen Hawking, for the way in which he made his academic work accessible to wider audiences, and the determination he had to work through disability (as a child, I always hoped I would one day meet him and I had that honour while I was studying at Cambridge).
What are you working on now?
Recently, I finished a draft of an anthology of skaldic poets; the book contains my translations of the work of ten poets from Iceland and Norway who lived between the ninth and fourteenth centuries. The book builds on the work of my PhD in Old Norse Literature, where I specialized in skaldic poetry, an intricate and riddling form of verse with which very few English speakers are familiar. My goal is to make this poetry of the Vikings and their ancestors accessible to non-academic audiences. As I type out this answer, my manuscript is being considered by a publisher. Now I am turning my attention to some poems and short story drafts, to see what I can edit and send out (it’s been ages since I did any journal submissions because I was so focused on the translation manuscript with the few hours a week I have without my young kids). There is also a fantasy novel I started writing a couple years ago, then put on hold, but that is likely the next big project I will tackle.
What question would you like to ask the next author featured at Speaking of Marvels?
Is synesthesia a conscious component of your writing?
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Emily Osborne’s poetry, fiction and Old Norse-to-English verse translations have been published in journals and anthologies such as Vallum, CV2, The Polyglot, The Literary Review of Canada, Barren Magazine, and Great Lakes Review. Safety Razor is her debut book of poetry (Gordon Hill Press, 2023). In 2018, Emily won The Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award for Poetry. Her poetry has been shortlisted for several other prizes. Emily received a PhD in Old Norse-Icelandic Literature from the University of Cambridge. She lives on Bowen Island, BC, with her husband and two young sons. She is a poetry editor for PULP Literature.
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