Stowaways takes Lansdowne prize

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This article was published 05/05/2015 (3792 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sometimes it’s better to set the manuscript aside and explore new ideas.

At the Manitoba Book Awards, held on April 25 at the Marlborough Hotel, Wolseley writer Ariel Gordon won the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry for her collection titled Stowaways. The annual award recognizes the best written full-length adult book of poetry in Manitoba.

Prior to Stowaways, Gordon was working on an elaborate, complicated manuscript about Thomas Edison, but was having trouble writing it. She received an email from Palimpsest Press, the company that published her first poetry book called Hump saying the company wanted to publish another book of hers and asked if she had anything ready. Knowing her manuscript was nowhere near completion, Gordon said yes.

“I decided to cheat on this manuscript for one poem,” Gordon said.  

After the first poetry indiscretion, many followed and soon Gordon found herself compiling all the unplanned, casual pieces of work she had created in recent years.

“I had about 60 pages worth of stuff and thought let’s see how this holds together,” Gordon said. “Instead of it being this weird dog’s breakfast of unrelated things it came out really cohesive.”

Stowaways became a combination of urban nature poems and how-to poems, both practical and impractical, such as how to prepare for flooding, how to learn Morse code and how to rip a phone book in half.

“It is half field guide and half survival manual,” Gordon said.

She was a little surprised by how overwhelmingly positive the response was from her publisher for Stowaways since a good portion of the poems had not been “workshopped” or finely edited through writing circles. Gordon admits she was actually a bit terrified when sending it off. The recent acknowledgement at the awards provided her with a sense of accomplishment.

“It’s a really nice thing to be nominated and it’s an even nicer thing to win, it’s a little bit of validation,” Gordon said.

She joked about how great it is to go to a party and come home with a cheque, as the Lansdowne Prize for Poetry is paired with a $1,000 reward.

The mother and writer views poetry as a form of writing she enjoys but not one that she is restricted to, saying “poetry, fiction, novels, they are all just containers for human conversation.”

She also works at the University of Manitoba Press and dedicates two days a week to her personal writing. Gordon is not certain as to how well Stowaways is selling at the moment, but it is available at all major book stores in Winnipeg. She was selected for the Deep Bay Artists’ Residency this summer in Riding Mountain National Park, which is put on by the Manitoba Arts Council.

In the near future Gordon hopes to write a creative non-fiction piece with a focus on urban forests as well as a collection of long poems centred on the lives of her grandparents and the origins of her great, great grandparents.