This past Sunday we had the great pleasure to welcome Camille Roy to Lightrail Studios to discuss Sherwood Forest (Futurepoem, 2011). We began our interview talking about the relevance of Sherwood Forest and how this fictional place represents a possible underworld or counter-culture. Camille wanted to capture how these spaces are both intimate and under-represented in mainstream art and media. "Sherwood Forest is about what can't be assimilated." This is a wonderful and surprising work of poetry that reveals the fluidity of human identity and experience. She wants to represent narrative in a way that captures actual human interaction. Camille talks about how we never truly know each others complete stories and yet contemporary narrative often assumes that the reader should know the story in totality. Her book works towards a more realistic retelling of story. The book is filled with peril and what she calls the "purity of dread" that we encounter when we are so involved in a situation that we cannot have a distanced perspective. The poems foreground experience rather than intellectualization. In this work, humans, and human bodies are presented in their natural state, as opposed to the stripped down version we tend to present when we privilege the image/visual rather than the sense of smell. We also found out that Camille has a very soothing reading voice, when she shared a few pieces from her book.
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