Convocation: Melanie Siebert

This year’s top graduate student thesis is already a published book of poetry. Even before writing student Melanie Siebert defended her poetry thesis for her MFA—which has earned her the Lieutenant Governor’s Silver Medal—it was accepted for publication by McClelland and Stewart. Published in April, Deepwater Vee is already making waves in the Canadian poetry scene and was featured in a segment of the CBC Radio show The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers, who called the book “ravishing.”

“I got a taste of poetry in high school,” says Siebert. “And I’ve always collected scraps of words in journals. But it was years after leaving my little Mennonite hometown that I just happened to pick up a book of poetry by Di Brandt. Her poems had this rebellious, stormy kind of singing that argued with her Mennonite ancestors. That’s when I realized that poets were living and breathing people—that it was possible to speak to and about your own little corner of the world.”

And that engagement with the world for Siebert includes close attention to rivers. Siebert grew up in the Peace River country in northern Alberta and then near the North Saskatchewan River in Saskatchewan. Deepwater Vee is intensely concerned with the deteriorating state of the continent’s northern rivers and the effects of environmental degradation on people and wildlife. The poems draw upon her years of working as a wilderness guide on rivers across Alaska, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. But also, closer to home, the book explores rivers like the Athabasca and the North Saskatchewan—rivers clearly impacted by industrial development. “There’s something sad,” she says, “about not being able to dip your cup into a river. A hundred years ago, you could drink from any river in Canada.”

While attending the University of Saskatchewan, Siebert took her first poetry workshop with award-winning poet Tim Lilburn. “At the end of that course, he said that if I wanted to take my work further, I should go to UVic,” Siebert recalls. She pulled up roots and transferred here, where she completed her BFA in writing.

Although she was encouraged to pursue graduate work at a major writing program in the US, Siebert decided to stay at UVic because Lilburn—who had, himself, subsequently moved to UVic as a faculty member—agreed to be her supervisor.

“At UVic I’ve had a chance to work closely with writers like Tim Lilburn, Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane,” she says. “They’re some of Canada’s finest writers who are thinking about the way we dwell here—sometimes haphazardly, sometimes violently, maybe even sometimes with grace—in and among this larger community of beings. And they’re doing this thinking with agile, spirited language.”

Siebert describes the writing program as one of mentorship. “Being a part of that writer-to-writer conversation,” she explains, “really ignites your desire to make the work worthy.”

Currently, Siebert is the first artist-in-residence at UVic’s Centre for the Study of Religion and Society, where she is helping organize a conference on religion and writing and working on new poems.

“Deepwater Vee feels to me like just a start in terms of thinking about rivers, colonialism and the underbelly history of our relationship to the land,” she says.

“Writing, for me, is a way to sink into the places I love, even as they’re steadily disappearing.”