Interview: Helen Rickerby talks about My Bourgeois Apocalypse

Helen Rickerby has previously published four and a half collections of poetry, including How to Live (Auckland University Press, 2019), which won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Rickerby single-handedly ran Seraph Press, a boutique but significant publisher of New Zealand poetry, and was co-managing editor of literary journal JAAM from 2005 to 2015. She earns a crust as an editor and technical writer. Helen talks to NZ Booklovers.

Tell us a little about your new book, My Bourgeois Apocalypse.

My Bourgeois Apocalypse is a collection of poetry, though I am pushing the boundaries of what some people might consider poetry. We’ve been calling it a poetic collage-essay-memoir, because I crafted the poems from sentences from my journals covering the period from the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2024, six weird years that included a massacre, a pandemic, and some more individual experiences and griefs. My journals aren’t just diaries – though there are some whiny diaryish bits – but they also contain a lot of thinking and remembering, drafts of poems, writing exercises and notes of all kinds, including Italian homework. So it’s kind of like ‘found’ poetry, but perhaps more ‘self-found’ poetry…

What inspired you to write this?

It started with just one poem that I wrote as an experiment. I had been playing with randomness and chance in my writing, and I was already really interested in how our brains try to make meaning from disconnected things. I had seen a movie about Brian Eno and really liked his approach to art, which often uses randomness, and I had been listening to a podcast with Sheila Heti talking about her book Alphabetical Diaries (which I still haven’t read – I have delayed because I didn’t want to copy her). I had the idea of seeing what I could make out of sentences from my journals, and I liked the result. It sounded a lot like the poems I write anyway, so I crafted a few more. And then I thought, ooh I could write a whole book like this, which both abstracts and crystalises that time period.

What research was involved?

There wasn’t any research as such, but some of the sentences were quotations from books I’d been reading, and it was a bit time consuming to track them all down to make sure I’d got them all correct! (I hadn’t….)

What was your routine or process when writing this book?

In some ways it began years ago, with writing in my journals, but the first draft of this book took only a few months. Each poem is made of sentences from just one journal (there’s about two poems from each journal.).. I would randomly pick sentences from the journal and type them into a document until it felt like the right number. Then I spent a lot of time arranging and rearranging them, and often cutting some sentences out. So all the sentences are out of context and I was looking for what seemed to me to be interesting or surprising juxtapositions and connections. In the book the poems are arranged chronologically – apart from the first one (‘#1 (A sort of prologue)’) – but I didn’t write them in that order.

If a soundtrack was made to accompany this book, name a song or two you would include.

I have actually made a soundtrack for this book! It’s here on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6G9FZqJPlb8MHw0iirMSni?si=Qy0tg28QRWqUkLkumZbPzw

The songs are ones that were mentioned in the poems, or which I remember from events that are mentioned in the poems. They are mostly from the 1980s and 90s, with occasional evidence that we’re now in the 21st century.

During the years covered in this book, music and dancing (and also singing) were especially important in my life for various reasons – we usually have music playing at home, I was rediscovering how much I enjoyed dancing and we ended up having a few dance parties during lockdown (some via Zoom, some just with my bubble), I was taking singing lessons, I was noting down songs to potentially play at our music appreciation society, and we (my husband and I) spent quite a bit of time during the first lockdown writing a blog with some friends that jumped off from songs that were on the New Zealand charts in 1990 and 1991 – so a lot of songs got into my journal.

If I had to pick just one, perhaps ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ by Cyndi Lauper – it’s only partly true, girls want a lot more than that (‘fundamental human rights’ as the saying goes), but it’s a great song, and is a good theme tune for the middle-aged woman.

What did you enjoy the most about My Bourgeois Apocalypse?

I think I most enjoyed surprising myself – putting one sentence next to another sentence it changes them both. And also it was nice being reminded of some things that have happened, or that I have thought, or have read, during this time.

I’ve kept journals since I was a teenager, but have always been a bit embarrassed about them. My close people are aware that at my death they are to be burned unread. But I have a strong interest in journals and diaries and their place in, and connection with, literature. And I also value their importance as places of creativity and personal processing. For me, they are certainly where everything starts – I draft almost all of my creative writing in my journal before typing it up onto my computer. I have always loved reading the published diaries of other writers, like Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Plath. So, while mine will never be published in raw form, I was quite pleased to be able to put them to use by making something out of them.

What did you do to celebrate finishing this book?

I can’t remember – perhaps I should go back to my journals and check! That said, there are many points of finishing – a first draft, the final draft, the final edited draft, and then when the book is printed and released. For that last one, I’ll be having a launch party, which, as well as the usual speeches and so forth, will involve dancing to some of the songs from the soundtrack.

What is the favourite book you have read so far this year and why?

I’ve just recently read Scaffolding, a novel by Lauren Elkin, which is set in an apartment in Paris in two different time periods with different characters – the early 1970s and some more contemporary time. I enjoyed its story, but what made me love it so much is its form – it’s made up of fragments of varying lengths – and its depth. It’s a very rich book, with a lot about Lacanian psychoanalysis (which I know little about), feminism, relationships and selfhood, but it isn’t a hard or heavy book. But it is the kind of book that made me sorry it was ending, because I just wanted to keep reading it, and made me think I would get even more out of it when I read it again.

What’s next on the agenda for you?

Ever since I finished my previous book, How to Live (2019), I’ve been thinking about and making notes for a book exploring the idea of doubt, but with everything that was going on in the world and my life I got a bit stuck on the actual writing of it. But writing My Bourgeois Apocalypse seems to have cleared away those blocks, and I’ve returned to that project and am finding it more relevant than ever. And I’ve started actually writing it, though there’s a lot more thinking and reading and writing to go before it will be finished.

Auckland University Press