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Words with Karen Connelly

© Paula E. Kirman

At the ripe old age of 32, Calgary-born writer Karen Connelly has accomplished more in her literary career than writers twice her senior. A Governor-General's Award winner (for Non-Fiction for her book Touch the Dragon in 1993) and world traveller, Connelly's experiences of living abroad has touched most of her work. The Border Surrounds Us (M&S) is a collection of poetry inspired by the refugees and political dissidents of the Burma-Thai border, and Connelly's descriptive passages often resonate with terror and trauma.

I spoke to Karen Connelly about her poems, as well as her work in general. She is a very articulate young woman who easily looks beyond her youth, making astute comments about the world around her.

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Paula: Why did you choose poetry as the form in which to describe your observations?

Karen: You don't really choose poetry; poetry chooses you. You see what you see and then you have some sort of reaction to it. Poems come quite naturally. I also believe that poetry can be and should be a political art form and a form of art that can speak broadly about what is happening in the world or, in the case of some of the poems, very specifically. I'm also working on essays and I'm also working on a novel about Burma so I basically have all of my faculties working, but the poems about the border are the first pieces that have been published and that is probably because it is the most visceral and emotional response.

Paula: What it is about Burma that intrigues you?

Karen: It's the situation of people who are in many ways like us; struggling to confront their leaders, to confront the dictatorship that has been over them for almost 30 years now. The thing that is fascinating about Burma -- the context there is that so much of the original movement by the people against the military dictatorship of the country was created by the students. In fact, politically when you start studying the history of a lot of nations, third world or not, this tends to be the case, that student movements tend to b really important to politics. In Burma there is an incredible tradition of that and in fact the original leader of the move for independence from Colonial England began as s student working against the colonial movement in Burma in the 20's so there is this incredible, very rich, fascinating history of student action against the government. As a young person I was just very interested in that. I still am interested in that. I went there when I was 26 so I wasn't as young as the people who originally started those movements against the government, particularly in 1988 when there was such a huge cataclysm of protest nationwide against the dictatorship but I was young enough to realize how incredible that was and of course all of the people who were in that first wave of student, they are all my age now; the people of the border who I was writing about, they're all in their 30's now. And also I was really interested in Burma because it is right next door to Thailand and I had such an incredible experience when I lived in Thailand as a young woman, as a teenager in fact, but it was in many ways a natural progression for me. Of course, the poems about the border, many of them are in Thailand. It was a very natural step, somehow.