Laurence Hutchman, in Writers' Words: Conversations with Eight Canadian Poets, interviews major poets of the modernist period: Ralph Gustafson, George Johnston, P.K. Page, Fred Cogswell, Louis Dudek, Al Purdy, Anne Szumigalski and James Reaney. They speak in depth about the challenges of the writing life, the complex evolution of their aesthetics, the mysterious nature of the writing process, and the origins of the poem.

Laurence Hutchman was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and grew up in Toronto. He received his PhD from the Université de Montreal and has taught at a number of universities. For twenty-three years he was a professor of English literature at the Université de Moncton at the Edmundston Campus. Hutchman has published 13 books of poetry, including Foreign National, Beyond Borders, Reading the Water, Personal Encounters, Two Maps of Emery, The House of Shifting Time, Fire and Water (in collaboration with Eva Kolacz) and Swimming Toward Sun Collected Poems: 1968-2020. He has also co-edited the anthology Coastlines: The Poetry of Atlantic Canada and edited In the Writers’ Words.

His poetry has received many grants and awards, including the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence and has been translated into numerous languages. In 2017 he was named poet laureate of Emery, north Toronto. He lives with his wife, the artist and poet, Eva Kolacz in Oakville, Ontario.

Laurence Hutchman's profile page

Hutchman … conjures the gods of poetry. [His] interviews with each of these eight poets is an intimate conversation ... We hear their voice, their commitment to poetry, and their example of a life lived for poetry. Hutchman's book stays vivid and lively and brings the reader directly into the personality and writing of each of the eight poets. For anyone of any age, either scholar or reader, who is interested in the modernist poets of Canada, this book is an indispensable companion to the poets' collected works. That is part of the magic of this book.

Stephen Morrissey

Hutchman proves to be the best kind of interviewer, intimately familiar with and appreciative of the work of his subjects, and spare but generative in his questions. His conversations with Ralph Gustafson, George Johnston, Fred Cogswell, P. K. Page, Louis Dudek, Purdy, Anne Szumigalski, and James Reaney are all very different in tone and pacing, but share a sense of generosity and openness.

Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review