THE BATTLEFORDS — The library was one of dee Hobsbawn-Smith’s favourite places growing up, a little girl in the small town of Courtenay, British Columbia, nestled in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, spending almost every Saturday combing through rows of books in the town’s library.
That love of books and her captivation with the written word is proof that the award-winning author, chef, poet, and journalist who's left her mark on Vancouver, Calgary, and now rural Saskatchewan is prepared for her two-year appointment as Saskatchewan’s 10th Poet Laureate (if memorizing The Highwayman in Grade Four isn’t enough.)
An introduction to shitty poetry
Hobsbawn-Smith's first memory of her interaction with the written word as a writer began as a teenager with the writing of terrible sci-fi short fiction stories that involved turning her brothers’ names backwards and using them as characters.
“I wrote science fiction because I had a hard time figuring out how to write a story where something happened in a normal day-to-day kind of situation … I had a good imagination, but I didn't have an imagination for how to utilize day-to-day life in a piece of fiction.”
Eventually, when her family left the Air Force and headed east, she took her final years of school in Langham, just about 30 kilometres from the province's largest city, Saskatoon.
"I was already interested in literature as a language, the sound of it and the shape of it and just reading it and listening to it and not always understanding what those poems were about, but loving, loving the listening,” Hobsbawn-Smith said, describing her English literature courses taken via correspondence.
But despite living in the same house that her grandparents and mother used to live in before her, she felt like an outsider in school after a life of moving with the Air Force.
“I felt like my bones are talking to the dust here. And there was a sense of fitting … but I always felt a bit of an outsider in the schooling sense,” she said, noting that she later ended up being the fifth or sixth generation of her family to live in the area.
“I was trying to find ways to fit in that weren't always appropriate … I learned how to drink, and that was a painful process. And I learned about boys, and that was a painful process. And I thought about girls, and that was a painful process. And through it all, I had started writing shitty poetry.”
Shaking Saskatchewan’s dust off her feet
On her mother’s side, Hobsbawn-Smith is descended from Hutterites: makers and artisans from Europe. On her father’s side, her grandfather Bill Smith designed tapestries for LaFrance textiles in Woodstock, requiring what she describes as a mechanical and mathematical brain. Hobsbawn-Smith decided before graduation that no matter what she decided would be her future career, she had to be making something.
When she turned 18, she said wanted to shake the dust of Saskatchewan off her feet. She moved to Vancouver, where she stayed with her older sister Lee for three months before attending college. And while she took French, History, and of course, English classes, money problems eventually made her decide to stop going to university and seek out work instead.
Making use of a government program that had a computer analyze skills, interests, and aptitudes, the program ended up giving her a list of possible careers that included moving to Nova Scotia to build ships, designing jewellery and fashion, but notably of interest to Hobsbawn-Smith, was cooking.
Eventually, she found herself in Calgary, raising kids, running a restaurant or a catering company (or all three), where the first point of entry back into her youthful passion for writing was her first cookbook.
“So I would cook, and then if it worked, I'd write it down … when I sold my restaurant, I had a stack of recipes. So I pitched my first cookbook to Whitecap Books in Vancouver. And as it was, they said yes.”
But despite a love of cooking, Hobsbawn-Smith remembers telling Elaine Jones, her editor, that she wanted to keep the sidebars for her recipes.
“And it was a decent piece of writing … but I saw it very clearly as an entry point into the kind of writing I wanted to do,” Hobsbawn-Smith said, who then ended up writing for the Calgary Herald as a freelancer with a weekly column called The Curious Cook.
“I learned to become a journalist on the go. And I had good editors who were patient with me. I remember my first stuff would come back with ink all over, and I’d go, ‘Oh, my God...’” And she’d be told she just has to revise.
Now she calls herself the revision queen, an idea that served her well as she began to plan a future career in writing.
“By then, I was writing about food, and every now and then, one of my poet friends would say, ‘Oh, your column in the Herald today, it gave off emanations of Annie Dillard’ … So I thought, alright, how do I get more of that into my writing?”
Danceland Diary — the quintessential prairie novel
Although she’d been living in Calgary for 27 years, she decided she wanted to get out of the culinary world there and back into writing. Not wanting to move to Regina, where her future husband lived, they decided to move back to 18 acres of her family farm in the late 2000s.
“I knew that if I stayed in Calgary, I was going to remain completely caught up in the culinary world where even though I wasn't running a restaurant anymore, I was writing restaurant reviews, and I was doing cooking classes … I knew I had to actually physically remove myself; do a geographic rescue,” Hobsbawn-Smith said.
“The goal was to move here and to become a writer.”
And it was an invitation to one of Sage Hill's writing retreats just outside Saskatoon that set her down that path despite being wracked with intimidation.
“...a poet [is] supposed to be this beautiful young woman, right. And here I am … part of it was intimidation because I felt older than a lot of the people there. Part of it was intimidation because I knew I was a rank beginner.
“And on top of it, it was the sense really that I had that food writing was a lesser skill … But there are fabulous food writers just like there are fabulous science fiction and fantasy writers."
But with the poor advice from a mentor at the time who suggested she stick to poetry and away from fiction, she worked on getting poems into magazines before finally returning to University in her 50s, where she joined the second cohort of the Master of Fine Arts program in Saskatoon in 2012.
When she started her MFA, she told Jeanette Lynes that she wanted to write a novel and that she had an idea that would double both as a first draft and as her creative thesis. With the guidance of Sandra Birdsell, Hobsbawn-Smith spent nine years writing her novel and Danceland Diary was published by Radiant Press in 2022.
"Even though I've only written one novel, I have a plan for a second one," Smith said, surprising herself.
"I never thought I'd say that, Miguel, holy s**t. I have a plan for a second novel. But I have a plan this time. ... so how hard is it going to be to write a second novel? Well, your guess is as good as mine."
A poet's description of poetry
When Hobsbawn-Smith was asked to describe poetry, she said that she frequently starts by writing prose before chipping away all the extra stuff, digging out line breaks and compressing it into a poem.
"Poetry, in essence, is a philosophical encapsulation of an emotion. It's a moment captured, it's how someone responds to something that has happened or that they have witnessed or that they feel ... a good short story isn't about what happens externally, it's about the change that's internal, and a poem is the same way."
When asked to describe a poem she said poetry really relies on the accurate use of language. There is a rhythm, a musicality that always draws her back and enraptured her all those years ago in a library in B.C.
And to her, it comes down to the function of words, as well as the artfulness and the way they're used, all in just 26 characters.
“You know, when I write a poem, I want it to be beautiful. But damn, I want it to have some kind of a message underneath … I don't want it just to be a beautiful piece of writing, I want it to have to be saying something ... utility conveying what it is that I've got in my head, above and beyond simply the story that might be the encapsulation of that particular poem.”
Hobsbawn-Smith went on to note that someone once said that poets are the unpaid legislators of the world.
"But, you know, the thing I like about poetry is you can use poetry to write political poems. You can use poetry to write love poems ... poetry can serve all kinds of purposes.
“I'm first and foremost a poet, I think ...you know, it's a hard question," she added.
The future for dee Hobsbawn-Smith
Because she’s talked herself out of work too many times by sharing information too early in the process of writing, she can't share what she's working on now. What she can say is that it's her belief that writers tend to write about a small number of themes. Hobsbawn-Smith's themes include grief, loss, and mourning while trying to find a way to recover from a loss.
But will she even continue writing? That was a question she asked herself a few weeks before she sat down for her interview with the News-Optimist/SASKTODAY.ca several weeks before her appointment as Poet Laureate.
Though she’s not convinced she has an audience, and she doesn't sell a lot of books, she gets great feedback.
“I looked at the fact that those kinds of wonderful responses aren't translating in my life as a writer into high sales or high visibility or anything like that. And so why do we write?”
Hobsbawn-Smith says that, in the end, she writes to express herself. She believes it helps her as a person and as an artist it helps her come to a better understanding of the world. She also writes (she hopes) to help others get through a dark time in our society referencing a resurgence of fascism and the erosion of women's, POC and LGBTQ2+ rights.
"All those things are under attack.
So, for now, she will travel across the province sharing the gift of the written word as an ambassador for poetry, something she says she's elated by.
"It feels abundant, it feels rich and really, really, really amazing, and humbling, and terrifying and overwhelming all at the same time," she said about her appointment.
"I will write ... but when I figure that I've said everything, then I'll just go back to cooking and quilting and running and everything else in my life and stop writing," she added.
"But I'm not there yet.”
