D.M. Bradford's Dream of No One But Myself explores family via words and images
D.M. Bradford is a poet, editor and organizer based in Montreal. His work has appeared in The Capilano Review, The Tiny, The Fiddlehead, Carte Blanche and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of House House Press.
Bradford's debut poetry collection, Dream of No One But Myself, brings together prose poems, verse and photographs to examine the experience and challenges of growing up in a "troubled" mixed-race family in Montreal's South Shore neighbourhood.
Dream of No One But Myself was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. CBC Books named Bradford a Black writer to watch in 2023.
In 2022, Bradford spoke to CBC Books about how he wrote Dream of No One But Myself and exploring personal and family history through poetry.
Getting recognition
"It's interesting — I'm a bit older for first-time poets. So to have the recognition, it's kind of wild. It's not exactly what I expected. But I believe in the book, and I've had a lot of people reach out and tell me how much it meant to them.
"But you don't necessarily expect that it turns into award nominations — there's a lot of luck and other things involved. It feels really good to see that in a sense, the book is kind of doing what it is designed to do."
Unearthing new insights
"The elevator pitch has evolved over the years. Dream of No One But Myself is a book that goes after the idea of certain kinds of personal history, certain kinds of trauma. From the get-go, as soon as I started writing about some of these family stories, I think I was always going after the idea of irresolvability — there isn't necessarily a solution in sight. Doing this work led to all kinds of revelations, insights, new ideas.
From the get-go, as soon as I started writing about some of these family stories, I think I was always going after the idea of irresolvability — there isn't necessarily a solution in sight.
"But the flip side is that I cycled through all those revelations when I edited the book, and then again when I launched the book. It can always be unloaded all over again. I was interested in a book that showed that process.
"Maybe it could help other people who are struggling with something similar, where you can't resolve things — where you just kind of exhaust the material for yourself to get to some other things."
Cathartic process
"There's an interesting catharsis for me in getting this stuff down and getting through the stories that I was kind of raised on and that me and my mother have been repeating to each other for the past couple of decades. When I got to the stuff that was new realizations, a more ambiguous area, that stuff was sort of fleshy and new.
It's a little messy — I did okay on that front [navigating trauma], but the bar for 'okay' is not that high.
"But once all that stuff was down, now it's just material and I'm playing with it and thinking about the effects it's going to have and the way I'm going to shape it into different forms — there was a real catharsis in that.
"It's a little messy — I did okay on that front [navigating trauma], but the bar for 'okay' is not that high. There were definitely moments that were difficult. When you get to new parts of the history and intersections of the material, facing that was difficult. As things were coming out and things were molding themselves, I could lean on the formal aspects as a way to get myself through it.
"And I was always careful with my mother, just to make sure she could receive the conversations we ultimately had to get to some of the answers I needed to get to."
An interdisciplinary approach
"I think it varies book to book, but with this one in particular, there was an element of being able to balance and coordinate the different forms.
It was a book that took a lot of organizing — but in a sense it organized itself, with there being so many options.
"It gave me all these different strands — all of these different kinds of boxes I could shift material into and organize the different forms in little sequences that would then lead to the next bit, and then to organize some verse poems in between those to kind of pop the whole thing into an embodied present of some sort. So it was a book that took a lot of organizing — but in a sense it organized itself, with there being so many options."
Unpacking intersectionality
"It's hard not to think of it biographically — cycling back through all of these realizations and when I was editing the book with Sonnet L'Abbé, I got to a point where I wondered if I needed to put more about the concept of diaspora and systemic issues that affected my father and grandmother's lives, and it turns out that a lot of that stuff is already in the book; it's just subtle.
I found myself looking at the Black radical tradition... I found a kind of embodied knowledge that I'd been carrying around for years without necessarily having the words to articulate it.
"And maybe in a sense that's part of where I come from — Black, intersectional, complicated in a gender sense — these things are kind of always overlapping. A lot of the things I do in this book are things that I was doing in my creative program in undergrad, where I had a lot of teachers tell me, 'Yeah, you're talented, but I don't know what the hell you're doing.' And then when I got into poetry, pretty quickly I found myself looking at the Black radical tradition. I found a kind of embodied knowledge that I'd been carrying around for years without necessarily having the words to articulate it — I found a lot of that reflected back to me, and started thinking about it in a different way."
Playing with form
"For me, poetry can kind of be whatever you want it to be. No one is expecting you to sell that many books, and at the end of the day, there are not as many worries about a particularity of form and there's a lot more space to just explore and let the book go wherever it's going to go on its own.
"I think a lot of the gestures I did in this book are not gestures that would have been really easy to convince an editor or a publisher about if I was trying to sell this as nonfiction or fiction. And in a sense, poetry gave me that permission — the permission to go as deep and as far out as you're hoping to. To just explore all these different forms and bring in these visual forms and let's see what sticks — it allowed me to do everything I could possibly think of."
No easy answers
"I think I was always hoping that people could maybe come to [the book] and get a bit of relief out of this idea of fully seeing the impossibility of a certain kind of closure. Sometimes there's something really powerful about just describing the problem — articulating the questions and not being made to feel like you have to come to that final epiphany that's going to resolve everything.
A mess is a mess — you're going to get around it, or you're going to get to the next step, but you may not ever get over it.
"I'm pleased to say that when people who have gotten in touch and in things that have been written about the book, it seems to be apparent that people are picking up on that.
"A mess is a mess — you're going to get around it, or you're going to get to the next step, but you may not ever get over it."
Advice for racialized and gender-diverse poets
"First and foremost, figure out what you need — what are you trying to figure out? When I started writing and was just starting to figure things out a tiny bit, no one was very interested in our stories. You could kind of just work it out and figure out what you were trying to say and how you were going to say it.
Trust yourself and go with it and the thing that comes out at the other end is going to be [the result of] the time you spent on yourself and the writing.
"I think there's a lot of pressure to perform and describe your difference to white and cishet audiences. And it's hard to resist that, I think, when you're just starting out. But I would tell them to be patient with themselves — that interest is still going to be there. Trust yourself and go with it and the thing that comes out at the other end is going to be [the result of] the time you spent on yourself and the writing."
D.M. Bradford's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
Clarifications
- This post was updated to reflect an author's change of name.May 10, 2023 2:23 PM ET