As part of Fest2Fest 2013, 49th Shelf's annual literary festival coverage, we're talking to authors who are gearing up to present their latest books to audiences across Canada.
Mathew Henderson received a great review of his debut poetry collection The Lease (Coach House Books) in The New York Times—"cuts . . . like a welder's oxyacetylene flame"—and appears at the International Festival of Authors November 2 and 3, 2013. Visit IFOA online for more information.
49th Shelf talks to Mathew Henderson about hard labour and harder men, and lust and loneliness on the oilfields.
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Julie Wilson: You're living in Toronto, originally from PEI. How did you end up working on the oilfields in Saskatchewan and Alberta?
Mathew Henderson: The short version is that I wasn’t accepted into university after high school, partially because I applied late and partially because I was a horrible student, so I had to follow my family out West and get a job. There was also my uncle heading to Alberta when I was very young, my father finally making the trip out there for my uncle’s funeral, my father losing his job, and the decisions the family made to leave PEI.
I worked as a production tester for around a year, then got into the University of Prince Edward Island. There is nothing like manual labour to make a lazy 17-year-old get his application-shit together. I then spent each summer during my five-year undergrad in either Alberta or Saskatchewan working for various companies.
Production testing is an interesting job because testers show up during most of the phases of a well’s life cycle, from the early drilling stages to post-production pump changes, and all of the fracking and stuff in between. Basically, a tester has a 30,000-litre tank that can withstand a lot of pressure, and a flarestack that can burn off gas, and the tester drives around the oil patch going wherever someone needs that tank, or they “safely” dispose of excess gas and fluid during some operation or another. We were are also responsible for conducting various tests and reporting results to the oil company: salinity, acidity, oil content, oil density, rate of flow, composition of fluid and things like that. Sometimes it involved a great deal of manual labour, and sometimes it was just sitting and looking at gauges. I was really quite bad at my job for the first twenty months.
JW: Others have noted that this work reminds them of Steinbeck. Talk about the artful work of writing about, to use your term, "actual work."
MH: I was very concerned with how I wrote about the physical act of working. It was important to me that a reader could finish a poem and have some understanding of the actual action, and I struggled a lot with that. It’s a thing, I think, that fiction writers deal with quite early on. It can be hard to figure out how to clearly move the reader from one place to another, how to make them pick something up and put it back down again. It's difficult to decide which details to include. Is it the movement of the feet, the knees, the legs, the arms? What do you describe and how much?
As a poet, I spent a lot of my early writing working on images and single scenes, so there wasn't a lot of movement. I started to think about complicated actions and tried to distill them down to the central action. When I thought of the multistep process of rigging out a flare stack, I focused on what my body remembered, what I remember my hands doing. I think those muscle memory actions are the ones that bring the actual work to life.
JW: The poems read like environmental portraits. To "lease" is to acquire acreage for exploration and production. What else does the term signify to you?
MH: I think of The Lease as a name for the time I spent in the oilfield. I felt like I was leasing myself out, like I was giving over my life in chunks of time. Now, I teach at a college, and I quite enjoy it, but, despite enjoying it, I’m really teaching so that I can have time to write. It’s this kind of bargain with society where you say, “Okay, I’ll do what you want for a while, so that I can do what I want later.” That’s the kind of luxurious version of it anyway, my version.
I was giving up a few months at a time, but for most of the people doing labour jobs, service jobs, factory jobs, it’s a much more serious leveraging. It was important to me that I didn’t let my kind of petulant 17-year-old self whine too much about having to work; instead, I wanted to create the atmosphere that these real guys live in where it isn’t just the work they give themselves to, it’s the lifestyle and the atmosphere and the ideology. For a lot of them, it isn’t 30 or 40 months, it’s 30 or 40 years. I think of that kind of bargaining of fulfillment or pleasure, the trade off, when I think of The Lease.
JW: There's a tension at work in these poems, as if you're at once curious about your subject matter yet sickened by the work and the men of the oilfields. Talk about the visceral nature of this collection.
MH: When I'm talking with friends, I describe the poems that I like as "just getting in my guts" or "messing me up" or in other, similar ways. I like poems that make the reader feel bad, like the world isn't the same at the end of poem as it was at the beginning, and when I'm writing, I hope to write these kinds of poems.
It was important to me that I write as honestly about myself as I intended to write about everything else, and that meant trying to capture the tension between curiosity that sometimes borders on idolization and that sickened feeling that you mention. I wanted people to see narrator of the poems, who isn't always literally me, as implicated in the actions and the events in the poems, and through that narrator, the "you," I wanted the reader to feel implicated, too. I wanted to put that guilt on them in a way that is loving and well-intentioned. I tried to make sure that I didn't hold back on my descriptions, that I didn't worry how people might view me as a person if I wrote about something harsh in harsh language.
JW: Have any of the men featured in these poems read this collection?
MH: I’ve had people who lurk in the backgrounds of the poems read them, people who know the men featured, and I’ve had lifetime oil workers from various regions read and comment on the book, but none of the characters in the book have read it. Not that I know of, at least. I stole a lot from people’s lives and words and characters, but mostly the people in the book are amalgams.
JW: There's a lot of fantasy and desire in these poems, loneliness, too. Talk about women in The Lease.
MH: More than anything else, I worried about how to handle misogyny in this book. There aren’t many actual, living, breathing women present in the oilfield. There are some, of course, but mostly it’s this abstraction, this dehumanized, objectified idea of a woman that’s present. And it’s always present. There was porn everywhere, and there were daughters and wives at home, and there wasn't a whole lot of room within that culture for a woman to inhabit a role outside of those categories. At the time, I felt a lot of conflict because I was in school, learning about feminism from these brilliant professors who I admired so much, and I was also ending up back in this place where it was so much easier to give in to this language and ideas about women. I wanted to show that struggle in the book, the struggle to change and to reconcile how one acts with how one thinks.
When I started writing The Lease, I was sure that I didn't want to write a judgmental, condemning book about the people I worked with, the culture or the industry itself. Not because there wasn't a reason for it, but because it wasn't a book I could write. I wanted to show the place, the atmosphere and the people (myself included) as accurately as I knew how to. I worried that when I wrote about women as they appeared in the oilfield, it would seem as if I was endorsing that view. I also worried that even if I was honest—that it wouldn't be an endorsement of the behaviour to report things as they were—that the world didn't need any more writing in which women end up stuck in these tired, hurtful roles.
In the end, I don't think I needed to worry as much. When I write the story, people see it and make those condemnations on their own.
JW: The Lease feels like a book that will be referenced as an historical document in conversations about the oil industry.
MH: I haven't considered the book as being historically relevant outside the field of poetry. I think most writers hold on to some tiny hope that what they write will be read years after they write it, but I've only engaged with that idea on the grounds of literary merit.
I was, and am, worried about positioning myself as an authority about the oil industry. I wanted to write poems which, together, give people an accurate idea of what the place is like, what the people are like, how it felt, and that, of course, is particular to me. The whole book is filtered through me, and I think that's the only reason I have any authority over the book itself is because it's all very personal.
JW: Have you yet encountered a subject as rich for a future work?
MH: I'm working on new things, but it's still very early in the process. I'm avoiding comparisons because The Lease is my first book, and I don't want to begin working on new things under the assumption that the processes will be similar. I'm thinking and writing a lot about myth, video games, obsession, addiction, the way we fashion narratives, and how we use those narratives to cope.
To view an excerpt from The Lease, visit Coach House Books online.
Below, listen to Mathew Henderson talk about, and read from, The Lease on Prairie Public Radio.
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Mathew Henderson is a graduate of the University of Guelph’s MFA program. Originally from Prince Edward Island, he now lives in Toronto, writes about the prairies and teaches at Humber College. The Lease was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry (2013) and the Gerald Lampert Award.
From Coach House Books: Distilled from his time in the Saskatchewan and Albertan oilfields, Mathew Henderson’s The Lease plumbs the prairie depths to find human technology and physical labour realigning our landscape. With acute discipline, Henderson illuminates the stubborn and often unflattering realities of industrial culture and its cast of hard-living men.