Sina Queyras Talks to the Montreal Gazette About My Ariel

Ian McGillis speaks with Sina Queyras at her home in Mile End for the Montreal Gazette. Queyras, whose new book, My Ariel (Coach House Books, 2017) is an "internalization and an extension," as McGillis puts it, of Sylvia Plath's Ariel, was not actually a lifelong Plath fan. More:

“Like most people, I think, I wrote poetry before I read it,” the 53-year-old recalled of her working-class childhood in Winnipeg. “The first poem I remember seriously reading was by Margaret Atwood. I was 10. My brother-in-law, who was 10 years older, had The Journals of Susanna Moodie and The Circle Game, and I basically stole them from him. I still have both of them. But I feel like I jumped over (Plath) at first, and I’m sad because those early Atwood books were written at pretty much the same time, and they really were in conversation with each other.”

Plath’s work has remained so much in the culture since she died at 30 that it’s easy to forget she was the product of a specific time.

“Yes, it’s my mother’s era, not mine,” said Queyras. “Every generation thinks they own Plath, but she’s solidly in that Atwood-Munro generation. Not long ago in New York I found myself hanging out with all these 85-year-olds, which was very apropos, because (Plath) would be 85 now. I love that generation of women born from 1930 to ’35, this short stint of extremely powerful women, slightly overly determined, who’ve gone through so much and had to work so hard to keep their careers on trajectory.”

The seed for My Ariel, as Queyras tells it, was very different from what it grew into over the course of five years and multiple rewrites.

Read all about it at the Montreal Gazette.