"By Creating We Think": A Conversation with Tessa Ransford (2010)

INTERVIEW "By Creating We Think": A Conversation with Tessa Ransford Erika 1 Waters Tessa Ransford has published sixteen volumes ofpoetry along with many essays and translations. Her latest,Not JustMoonshine: New and Selected Poems, was published by Luath Press in2008. "Unashamedly intellectual" isone critic'sjudgment of herpoetry,while others have commented on her experimentation with formand her international perspective. She isequally celebrated forher advocacy of Scottish poetry: shewas president of International PEN (ScottishCentre); founded the School of Poets PoetryWorkshops; edited Lines Review literary magazine; founded thegroundbreaking Scottish Poetry Library;and established theScottish Pamphlet Society along with itsCallum Macdonald Memorial Award, inpartnership with theNational Libraryof Scotland. Erika J.Waters: I wanted to ask, first, about your ORE. Was this in recognition of your remarkable dedication to theScottish Poetry Library? Tessa Ransford: OBE stands for Order of the British Empire and was instituted after the First World War to thank civilians for effortsduring the war, and then continued generally for services to the community. Mine was, yes, for "services to the Scottish Poetry Library," and Iwas happy to accept iton behalf of the staff,committee mem bers, and hundreds of volunteers. Iwas given the medal in 2000 by the queen at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh on the same occasion when Sean Connery was given a knighthood, and thecaptain of theScottish rugby teamwas given an OBE. He sat beside me! EJW:But Scotland is really your adopted home, isn't it? TR: That's true. My father, who was a royal engineer, was posted to India, where he became master of themint in Bombay. We lived in the mint compound, where there was a swimming pool and a garden. Mint House, where we lived, had high ceilings and huge double doors.My ayah slept by my cot?under mosquito nets, of course. In India, children are accepted as part of thenor mal scene, so they're carried around and allowed to sleep, feed,orplay wherever theirparents hap pen to be. InApril 1944 ships containing dynamite and raw cotton exploded at the Bombay docks, just half amile from themint. We were lucky to sur vive! Soon after?I was about six years old?my father was given some leave, and, since convoys were able to go through the Suez Canal by then, we set sail in convoy to Britain. We arrived in Scotland just after D-Day in June 1944.My father returned to India after a fewmonths and stayed until partition in 1947,while my mother stayed in Britain with my brother and me. EJW:The war really separated your family?very hard for you. TR:Yes [nods],but the war was hard foreveryone, wasn't it? Hardest for me was that the warm, spontaneous, expressive, relational experience of my early childhood in India was replaced suddenly by an extremely cold and repressive regime at boarding school inpostwar Scotland. It consisted, as I now see it, of physical, educational, Tessa Ransford March-April 2010 115 INTERVIEW Erika J. Waters previously taught at the University of the Virgin Islands,where she founded and edited The Caribbean Writer and served as guest editor of volume 23 (2009). She has also edited collections of drama, poetry, fiction, and literarycriticism, and her work on women writers was funded by Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has taught part-time at the University of Southern Maine since 2002 and was a Fulbright Scholar inFinland in2005. She iscurrently working on a book, Touring Coastal Maine, forArcadia Publishers. and emotional deprivation. But by chance, I dis covered thepoems ofRabindranath Tagore in the school library.Finding Tagore revivedmy latent Indian side, those Indian attitudes to lifeofwhich Ihad been deprived: holistic, relational attitudes, which see the material world as incorporating the spiritual and as a fitting home for thehuman. Do you know my poem "In Praise of the World, the Flesh and theDevil" (see insetonpage 17)? Ibelieve thatpoetry became a golden thread to guide me through the labyrinthof life. EJW:Your strong feelings about India certainly come through inyour poetry. In "WithGratitude to India," you write: "I was part of the par ties,parades, / the bazaar, / could swallow the stenches and listen to thepoetry...