Power Q & A with Catherine Owen
Q: Why does Sixteen Homes draw from so many different genres and mediums to speak personally about Canada’s housing crisis?
A: I originally conceived of Sixteen Homes as a more straightforward memoir that moved in a semi-temporal trajectory through the sixteen homes I have lived in, but as I wrote it, I realized that a diversity of approaches was required to enter different aspects of the divisive subject matter. As I composed the essays, all headed by diary entries from that era, poems kept appearing. Then I decided to ask my father to do drawings of the floor plans of the places I have lived. This request led to my interest in interviewing my parents about their houses, and later, to a conversation with them and the house-neighbour I grew up with about the building of this unique front and back duplex. Photographs of course had to be included. Nearer to the end, the short pieces on teen pregnancy, violence, privacy and further issues were added and the segments on other homes I have stayed in were re-jigged. So it became an elaborating collage, or what I have come to think of as an adaptation of the Zuihitsu form first written by Sei Shonagon in her The Pillow Book, which used essays, portraits, travelogues and lists to address life at court in tenth century Japan.
Our 21st century housing crisis is many narratives to many people but at the core of it is an instability, a leaping between. Sixteen Homes is a kind of mirror of this movement within its range of genres and mediums.
Catherine Owen.
You say house and wood falls over you like a cloak, your passion becomes windows. You say home and all memories gather.
In Sixteen Homes award-winning author Catherine Owen set out not to write a memoir but to reflect on a society that has priced many out of their home cities and to ask what that costs us all. Moving between diary entries, essays, poetry and photographs, Owen shares her path from her struggles with housing as a young mother to the security she now feels. From her parents’ purpose-built home in Vancouver – co-owned with another family – to Delilah – the century-old house she now owns in Edmonton – Sixteen Homes moves through the many places Owen has lived, as well as the homes she has visited. All along she invites the reader to consider what it is that turns a house into a home and who it is that gets to have one.
Catherine Owen, a born and raised Vancouverite, is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and prose. Her award-winning work has toured Canada, been turned into one-woman plays, translated into Italian, sung with a metal band and performed to children. She edits, teaches Poetic Forms and gardens from her 1905 home in Edmonton, Alberta.