Crow Reads is a podcast series by Rayanne Haines, in which she interviews intersectional authors, publishers, editors, agents, and booksellers working and living in Alberta about their books and the current state of the publishing industry. In August’s episode, Rayanne interviews Titilope Sonuga about her new role as Edmonton’s ninth Poet Laureate, the act of shapeshifting as a writer, artist, and woman, and the importance of hope and healing through poetry in these times. Sonuga’s most recent book, This is How We Disappear, is described as an exploration of the physical and emotional disappearance of women and a celebration of the magic of shapeshifting as an act of survival too. In the collection, she deftly uses storytelling as a lens to critique injustice and offer hope.

Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Titilope Sonuga’s family came to Canada when she was thirteen years old, with, as she puts it, “eleven suitcases and this journey to a new world.” Sonuga’s father is an engineer and her mother has a PHD in French literature. Sonuga shared, “I think most people who come from immigrant families will tell you, education is the way you pay back the debt.” So, with a love for design and building things, Sonuga received her engineering degree from the University of Alberta. The dream of writing and storytelling continued to call her though and Sonuga found herself regularly performing at open mics and black students’ association events. Early in her poetry career, she founded the Breath in Poetry Collective and attended a residency for black women writers in South Africa. Within a few short years she left her engineering career to pursue her writing and performing.

Intelligent, vulnerable in her truth telling, and with a lens, always, that looks at hope, Titlope Sonuga’s voice is rooted in empowerment and healing. The book, This is How We Disappear, began out of a dark place after the 276 Chibok girls in Nigeria were kidnapped.  In her own words, Sonuga says the event was “easily the most orbit shifting event of my life because for me something real happened in which hundreds of girls had disappeared in my home country, and it became apparent that that sort of thing could happen and the response would be lukewarm. It made me realize what the value of a girl’s life was to the world. But I didn’t want the collection to be just that because I also knew, and had been surrounded by women who had emerged out of the most horrific circumstances and emerged into something whole and fuller and beautiful. So, what if disappearance, metaphorically, is also a way to move on, to move forward into a feistier and fiercer version of who we are. What if disappearance is like a magic act also, of survival?”

Now as a mother of two children, Sonuga knows that every day mothering them, and even mothering herself, is an act of allowing herself to be soft enough to be molded, and reshaped, to hold love at the center of what she does, but also allows space for what is broken and weak and hurting—to offer herself grace in life and work. That grace shines through in our discussion about her hopes for the poet laureate role and the shifting of her work as she herself shapeshifts.

Says Sonuga, “my dreams are simpler. I want peace of mind. I want to be able to continue to do this work for as long as I live, and I want for the fruits of my labour to be able to feed my children and their children.” So, what does that mean for her role as poet laureate? Sonuga hopes to create an atmosphere in which people can come together in grieving the past few years, and feel our way towards some version of healing. As she shares, “There is no normal to go back to only forward right, so what does that forward look like in the context of art making?” One of the projects she hopes to create is a Cathedral of Tenderness. Sonuga wants to know what has kept people’s hearts soft over the last couple of years. She wants to know what has saved us.

You can listen to the full episode here: