An Interview with ON RULES author Tom Wayman

"The best advice I ever received as a writer is to read as a writer. If a piece I’m reading bores me, why? If a piece I’m reading dazzles me, why?"

Tom Wayman Photo credits: Rod Currie

Jen Knox (JK): Hi, Tom! Thank you for taking some time to answer a few of our questions. We are honored to feature your poetry in our forthcoming nthology. Can you tell us a little about the poems that will appear in On Rules?

Tom Wayman (TW): The recent pandemic (2020-2022, or so) affected the rural as much as the urban. With the news media and most cultural institutions largely being located in cities, however, the ways the pandemic impacted the countryside similarly to and differently from urban areas wasn’t much discussed. I wrote a series of poems about experiencing the pandemic where I live, in a remote mountain valley in southeastern British Columbia’s Selkirk Mountains. 

Rules designed to preserve the health of the community were a big part of the pandemic, with the matters of who made the rules, and how they were enforced, being contentious where I live. Since the rules changed as the authorities learned more about the virus, and developed techniques and then vaccines to combat the pandemic, people grumbled about the learning curve that our whole society had, willy-nilly, embarked on. Some of my neighbors turned to Dr. Google to find justification for their belief that they knew better than the doctors, scientists and public health experts. Or that the pandemic was a plot (“the PLANNEDemic:”). By flouting the rules, these neighbors felt they were doing the majority of us a favor.

My poems in On Rules deal with two particular issues—the fear that the pandemic could be spread by hands touching infected surfaces, and the way that health rules morphed as more became known about the virus and how it spread. The latter poem is based on the kids’ game Simon Says.

In case a reader isn’t familiar with Simon Says, the game requires that one person utter a series of commands: “Simon says put your hands on your hips. Simon says lift your right knee.” At some point in the series, a command is given (“Touch your nose with your left hand.”) and, according to the rules, you should not obey that command because the order wasn’t prefixed with “Simon says”. Players can be “out” according to the rules for obeying when the prefix isn’t given, or the game can be played just to exercise players’ ability to quickly assess what they’re told to do. I felt the game had resonance with how most people followed the decreed pandemic rules while a minority decided not to, and also how fast sometimes societal rules designed to fight the pandemic (disinfecting every public surface, schools shifting from in-person learning to online and back again to in-person) could change.

“Offering” arises from personal behavioral patterns, essentially rules, we each adopt early in life to handle stressful emotional situations. Such default behaviors can serve to protect us from unpleasant feelings while simultaneously impairing how we function in the world, including achieving things we desire, such as better relations with other people (or a particular person). The situation described in my poem is an adaption from the Arthurian legend of the search for the Holy Grail (an important motif in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”). One of the knights involved in the quest is permitted to see the Grail, but is not allowed (those rules, again!) to touch it because, like the rest of us, he has sinned. I discovered late in life how a fear of closeness has harmed my relations with other people. I have other failings, too! If the sought-after grail of human existence is to be loved and to love with an open heart, I can at least understand why I haven’t grasped this wonderful cup. Though I have seen it.

JK: How long have you been writing, and when did you begin?

TW: My first book of poems was published in 1973, so I have half a century of poetry publication behind me. But I had a number of inspiring high school English teachers that directly or indirectly encouraged me to write. As a University of BC undergrad, I worked on the student newspaper, which served as the farm team for the main downtown Vancouver daily. So for three summers (12 months), I worked as a summer vacation replacement cityside and features reporter for that daily. We summer employees were expected to go to work as reporters for the daily once we graduated from (or dropped out of) university. While at UBC I took creative writing courses as a way of improving my journalism.

However, I won a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to the two-year MFA program at the University of California, Irvine, where I began to seriously focus on my poetry. The 1960s were in full swing, so my shift from an expected journalism career to being a poet and teacher of writing was just one of many changes I went through.

JK: What is the best piece of advice you've received as a writer/person?

TW: The best advice I ever received as a writer is to read as a writer. If a piece I’m reading bores me, why? If a piece I’m reading dazzles me, why? I used to tell my writing students that if my course is successful, they will never again read simply for pleasure. I stressed that musicians constantly listen to other musicians, carpenters constantly evaluate the craftsmanship evident in buildings they are in, fine artists attend gallery shows, study art books, and even re-create famous paintings to comprehend from the inside how these were put together. Paying attention to how other practitioner of an art or trade create desired effects, or the reason other practitioners’ efforts fail, is the basis for always learning how to be better at what we do.

As a person, the best advice I received took the form of an observation by a counsellor whom I worked with who noted that I kept to the margins of whatever I did. I displayed a lot of emotional distance in any intimate relationship; I wrote poetry (a marginal art form) rather than, say, prose; I worked (in those days) at community colleges and alternative educational institutions rather than universities; and so on. The implicit advice was to try to understand why I feared to step forward, and to change my self-limiting behavior. 

This advice chimed with critiques of my poetry which said that for all its engagement with radical political themes, it took no emotional risks. Who we are is connected at many levels with what we write. The US poet Robert Bly, whom I had first met and admired at UC Irvine and with whom I had a desultory correspondence for many years, wrote me that: “the outer world is too much in the poems for the long run of life—more “water,” human intuitive possibilities lying at the back of your private brain need to come forward—be allowed to come forward, or up—to balance this marvelously developed sense of the solid world. You’ll never lose your solid world. It will just be added to, by trees and some witches and talking animals.” I’ve since written many poems about trees. But about witches and talking animals? Not so much.

JK: Please share with us one (or a few) of your favorite lines, either from your own work or someone else's work, and explain what strikes you about the passage.

TW: In the translation by Alastair Reid of the poem “Lazybones” (in Spanish, “El Perezoso”) 

by the Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda, the speaker in the third stanza depicts spring in his country:

In Chile now, cherries are dancing,
the dark mysterious girls are singing,
and in guitars, water is shining.

I love the idea that guitar music is like sunlight reflected off water. Because of the previous two lines, filled with action (dancing and singing), the image in the third line (as well as its repetition of the “-ing” sound that ends each line) for me conjures up the melodious sounds of that glittering water as it moves.

My own poems, as you can see from the ones included in On Rules, often employ a kind of hybrid of surrealism, magic realism and reportage. Here is a similar technique utilized by a master. The first two lines in the stanza could have appeared in a travel brochure about visiting Chile in the spring. The third line, though, infuses tremendous energy into the stanza by evoking (for me, anyway) sounds and motion not described. The line offers an irrational image (nobody would pour water into a guitar) that conveys a multi-sensory truth (how lively guitar music can lift our spirits, inspire and delight us). 

JK: How did you find your first publication?

TW: When I enrolled in grad school at UC Irvine, I found some of my peers were already submitting to literary magazines. They taught me how to submit work, and, besides their help, the English department’s lounge for writers subscribed to various magazines in which I could discover whether any poems like mine were of interest to the editors. We especially wanted to be published in journals like George Hitchcock’s kayak, Henry Rago’s Poetry and David Wagoner’s Poetry Northwest. Mr. Hitchcock’s rejections were the most interesting.

My first book of poems resulted from having appeared in a new-Canadian-poets-under-30 anthology published the then-prestigious Toronto publisher McClelland & Stewart (now a branch of Penguin Random House). Like many contributors to that anthology, I subsequently submitted a manuscript to the publisher’s poetry editor, John Newlove, who (eventually) accepted it.

JK: What are you working on now? Please share any links our writers can follow to read more of your work. 

TW: Since March 2023, I’ve been involved in shrinking a gigantic novel that I had put away for a couple of years. A year before, I had submitted to my usual publisher, Harbour Publishing (BC’s largest secular publisher), a memoir about moving to the rural and my misadventures since. They asked me to chop 40,000 words from it, so I spent fall 2022 and spring 2023 cutting 26,000 words before resubmitting it. I hoped they would have forgotten the number of words originally specified, and, indeed, in June 2023, they accepted the book, now scheduled to appear this spring (2024).

When I resubmitted the memoir in March, I was excited about exercising the skills involved in reshaping a larger work into a briefer but punchier form. So I decided to tackle applying what I’d learned working on the memoir to reducing the shelved enormous novel to a size where it might be publishable. It had been rejected multiple times (including by Harbour) before I put it away, probably because of its excessive length. PM Press in Oakland, California, told me, “Cut it in half!” So far I’ve cut 34,000 words, but believe it needs about that amount cut again.

Interestingly, as I’ve toiled on shrinking the novel, its through-line has become more timely. My book is about a counterculture crew of young Americans and Canadians employed at “urban renewal” in a run-down area of Vancouver, BC in 1970. The crew decides to try unionizing similar crews of young people at work on other buildings in that district. Suddenly, now, young people working at Amazon, Starbucks, even A & W have discovered unionization, and they face many of the same issues my characters deal with.

To read samples of my work (no excerpts from, the novel, though!), you can go to tomwayman.com and click on the “Writing” tab or the “Did I Miss Anything?” tab.