Climactic disasters drive SFU English professor to produce poetry trilogy

Four years ago, Simon Fraser University English professor Stephen Collis didn’t know he was writing a trilogy. When he released A History of the Theories of Rain in 2021, his poetry collection garnered praise for its focus on climate change, time, and grief, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry. Climate disasters since November of that year drove Collis to begin writing climate-focused poetry again, which led him to produce The Middle, part two of the series, and will lead to a third book in 2028.

“I started writing something very accidentally,” says Collis. “It was November of 2021, and we had that atmospheric river event, and it came on the heels of such a brutal forest fire season and that heat dome, so it seemed like a dramatic moment.”

These dramatic events and their devastating effects demonstrate the negative impact climate change continues to have on the planet. For example, a 2024 study found that the 2021 heat dome in B.C. “was 34 per cent larger and lasted 59 per cent longer, or 27 more days, than a heat wave would have without the effects of global heating caused by humans.” Heat domes can also “further amplify climate crisis-related events such as wildfires”. (Crawford, 2024)

Collis acknowledges that one of the reasons we keep hurting the Earth is because of our disconnection from it. However, that disconnection doesn’t come from being stuck in an office all day away from hiking trails. Instead, it comes from seeing ourselves in isolation and thinking everything revolves around us, which Collis sees as detrimental. Instead, he’d like us to place ourselves in the “context of the wider web of life” all the time. Thus, he chose migration and displacement as his central theme in The Middle.

“I wanted to write about migration and displacement, which seems a very human thing, but include birds and plants in the picture of displacement,” he says. “So, plants also get displaced. Plants also travel and migrate. Plants also are affected by climate change and need to go somewhere better. So, I just wanted to think holistically at the level of planet as a corrective in some ways to the isolation to human thinking and acting.”

While writing The Middle, Collis also drew inspiration from various literary sources, including the library of poet and SFU English professor emeritus Robin Blaser and medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri. While setting up the SFU English writer-in-residence office, Collis was filling the shelves with Blaser’s books—books important to Blaser while he was writing The Holy Forest, his collected poems.

“I was doing that and thinking about him and this moment happened,” says Collis. “So, I’d open a Robin Blaser book, and I would thumb through and find his marginalia and I was drawn to images, and it turns out there were lots of them of fire and flood in different books that he was reading. So, I started taking those as prompts to writing what I was writing.”

Collis titled the first poem in The Middle, “Blazing Space”, a play on Robin Blaser’s last name. The Blaser library also contained many books by Dante, including the three-part narrative poem, The Divine Comedy. The second part, “Purgatorio” or “Purgatory” focuses on Dante’s journey through the afterlife. This part became the core of Collis’ book, as the title poem of the book is a rewriting of “Purgatory”.

“It makes it kind of obvious where we are in the world, we’re living through climate purgatory,” says Collis. “We’ve left the old world where we used to be alive and it’s uncertain where we’re going, but we’re on a journey. We’re climbing a mountain, we’re hoping we’ll get to the earthly paradise, which is where you get to at the end of purgatory, that’s why that’s an important influence.”

Where are we going next? If A History of the Theories of Rain focused on climate change and time, The Middle on climate change and mobility, Collis says his trilogy will end with a book centered on space and place.

“There’s a particular space and place in South Delta that I’ve long been fascinated with, it’s just a wetland, but there’s a particular species of grass that grows wild there that I think is the most beautiful grass I’ve ever seen in the world. So, I want to get down on the ground, down to the grass, down to see the accidental, forgotten, marginalized spaces where grass tends to be one of the first things that grows.”