On Collage With Camilla Gibb, author of I Used to Be a Pisces

Today, we invite Camilla Gibb to the Book*hug blog to share the story of how revisiting collage work saved her from writers block, and subsequently led to the writing of her debut poetry collection I Used to Be a Pisces ! Take it away Camilla!

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I finished writing my last novel in 2019. A novel subsequently published into the great hollow carved out by the pandemic.

Often, toward the end of writing one novel, different ideas, ideas for a new novel have started swirling. But not in this case. I didn’t really know if I had another one in me. I still don’t. It takes a particular feeling of urgency or necessity to drive one to live so long in a single project.

The impulse to create was still there, but where it took me, was back to something I did a lot of earlier in life. Collage. Working with paper, images, scissors, glue.

Oh, the tactile pleasure of it all. The relief, freedom and joy of not having to be particularly talented or professional. And the gratification of taking something from inception to completion in a matter of hours or days, rather than years.

My return to collage started with a course in “altered books” at the Toronto School of Art in 2019. I had found a book about walks in the Yorkshire Dales left on a sidewalk, and this was the book I would spend months altering.

Sometimes this involved found poetry. Sometimes, erasure poetry. It had me thinking about words differently—about the visual of print, about blank space and how we pare things down to the exacting, to the just enough.

With the images here, and collages I subsequently and continue to create, I am interested in interactions within and between characters ((human or otherwise) in different environments. Connections, tensions and disconnections between people, species and ecosystems elicit complicated and often contradictory emotions.