Interview with Professor Daniel Tysdal

By Vikram Nijhawan

Daniel Scott Tysdal is an award-winning Canadian poet and filmmaker. Originally from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, he earned a B.A. from the University of Regina, followed by two M.A.s – one in English from the University of Acadia, followed by another in creative writing at UofT, where he now teaches at the Scarborough campus. Daniel also holds the special position of Faculty Advisor for Screenwriting at Victoria College. This year, he will be teaching the course VIC276, “Writing for the Stage and Screen”. Daniel won the Re-Lit Award for Poetry in 2007. He is best known for his publications The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems (2013), and his collection Fauxccasional Poems (2015).

You are most widely recognized as a poet, but not as much for your filmmaking or screenwriting endeavours. When and how did you first become interested in this field?

My first love as a wee human being was movies. I started making movies when I was thirteen, two years before I started writing poetry regularly, and my teenage dream was to make B-grade, heck, even Z-grade, horror movies. When I started my undergraduate degree at the University of Regina in 1996, I intended to study film. However, mental health problems that had started during high school totally swallowed me. It was poetry and a loving and supportive family that helped me endure and manage my illness, and, eight years after starting my undergraduate degree, I finally finished it.

By that point, I had fully committed to literature, poetry and short fiction in particular, so that was the path I followed. After I was hired to teach Creative Writing at UTSC in 2009, I returned to film. I started taking classes, writing traditional and experimental shorts, and then I actually attended film school and started making short films. I now split my creative time 50/50 between film projects and literature projects.

On the surface, poetry and film appear to be two completely different creative media. How would you compare the process of writing poetry to writing a film? Are there some surprising similarities between these two artistic modes?

Form-wise, poetry and screenwriting are deeply linked by the need for concision and for specific, striking images. As for the processes themselves, they are, of course, united by the need to revise and work effectively with feedback. So often with a poem and a script, the work is to streamline, combine, pare down, and cut.

As for filmmaking itself, maybe this should not have come as a surprise to me, but one connection that really did surprise me was the relationship between rhythm in poetry and rhythm in editing a film. As poets, we work with rhythm in so many ways: from the rhythm of the music of language to the rhythm of imagery to the rhythm of a poem’s developmental arc. I found these poetry composition skills directly translated into editing movies, to working artfully with the order, type, length, etc. of shots. On this topic, I do have to send a shout-out to my film school friend Brenton Richards. Without his one-on-one help learning the software, I never would’ve discovered I had those talents.

At the most personal level, I would say one of my main sources of inspiration is my experience with depression and suicidal ideation. So often the struggle is just to be, to be and to remain alive, and creating art is one of the central ways I maintain some sort of coherence and resilience. Rarely in my poetry collections do I address this experience overtly, but all of these works are a testament to this illness and struggle and endurance. In recent years, I have been able to address and have felt the urge to explore these experiences more directly, by expressing these thoughts in several articles and talks.

In the Fauxccasional Poems Video Project, you made film adaptations from works you wrote in your titular collection. How would you describe this unique adaptation process?

I would describe this adaptation process as really, really fun. I loved the opportunity to dive into the poems from this completely different perspective, and I loved the chance to collaborate with so many talented artists. I knew I didn’t want to simply record myself reading the poems, so initially I was stuck. The project finally gained traction when I realized that each adaptation would be done using a different genre of YouTube video: vlog, documentary, lost footage discovered, acapella, “chorus” reading a shared text, and the cut-up. From there, I worked with past collaborators I really admired and met a whole bunch of new talented artists and performers.

Each of these videos holds a special place in my heart, but, if I have to single out one as my favourite, I would choose The Oath of Isis. I had the honour and joy of collaborating with past UTSC Creative Writing students. So much of what is good in my life is the result of learning with and from them, so that made this video a really special experience. The only one that was really hard to make was The Walls, because it involved spending hours listening to you know who blather on. It’s the hardest one to watch, too.

There seems to be a common misconception about poetry (and art in general), that a poem’s literary merit is directly tied with its ambiguity – if the layperson cannot understand what the poet is trying to convey, the work and its author should be held in higher esteem. Your thoughts?

You are so right that, in certain echelons of poetry and other arts, merit does get tied to ambiguity, obscurity becomes a sign of greatness. It’s a way for people to distinguish themselves, to prove they have the cultural capital, they have the degrees and training, they have the privileges and brilliance to be the true artists and the ultimate arbiters of taste. Please feel free to yawn.

Beyond this, though, I also think that the ambiguity-merit connection arises from a misunderstanding of art. Art is not a puzzle to be solved any more than an elm or an owl is a puzzle to be solved. A work of art is an entity and environment that, like all entities and environments, is there to be experienced, to be interacted with, to be lived with and in. In this sense, then, I hope my works are an open prairie crossed with a shoreline crossed with a spider crossed with a bat. Wait, is that a puzzle? Just live with it for a bit.

What can students enrolled in VIC276 expect to learn from you, that they wouldn’t learn in any other screenwriting course?

I bring a range of experience and interests that I find is rare in a screenwriting class. I am prepared and keen to work with students who want to compose a tight, textbook genre script (whether a comedy, horror, or action film), those who want to write a high art drama, those who want to create a far out experimental work, and all the other possible creations in between. I also hope to bring this same range and openness to our immersion in the screenwriter’s experience. As with other classes, we will closely study craft and we will connect with a host of industry professionals. Unlike many classes, though, we will also look at the many paths we can take as screenwriters, particularly in terms of developing a personal writing and filmmaking practice. In other words, we will learn that poets and filmmakers are not as different as we might think.