Ito in the house

It didn’t take Sally Ito long to settle into her new role as the Winnipeg Public Library’s latest writer-in-residence.

“The library itself is such a fascinating place,” Ito says in her new office on the second floor of the Millennium Library downtown on her first day on the job.

“There are all kinds of books here, and all kinds of people. I want to explore both the books and the people.”

A Japanese-Canadian writer, translator and instructor of creative writing at Canadian Mennonite University, Ito’s most recent poetry collection, Heart’s Hydrography, was published by Turnstone Press in 2022. She previously served as writer-in-residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture.

“It’s one thing to teach creative writing, but when you’re a writer-in-residence, you get a wider array of people coming to see you about all kinds of writing that they do,” she says.

The library’s writer-in-residence program is a free service for emerging and established Manitoba writers across all genres. During her term, which runs until April 30, 2027, Ito will provide one-on-one consultations and writing workshops, and facilitate a writers’ circle.

“The experiences I’ve had in the past as writer-in-residence have opened me up to a wider cohort of people that are writing that may not have anyone they think they can show it to, that aren’t in community with others. It’s something they’re doing by themselves and they don’t know who their readers are. I feel I can be a bridge person for them to a community that might be interested in reading their writing,” Ito says.

Fostering a community is important for writers at any period of their careers, but perhaps especially so for emerging writers just starting to find their voice — and their audience. Helping writers find that voice and those people is a task Ito does not take lightly.

“I don’t think people write in a vacuum. They write to say something. When you’re the first reader of something, you’re entrusted with a person’s words, and that’s a heavy thing to be entrusted with. I feel like you need to be aware of that and be conscious of what that person, as a person, is communicating to you from their soul about themselves,” Ito says.

Indeed, Ito brings her years of experience facilitating writing workshops and teaching creative writing to each consultation.

“I have a real good sense of genre. Are you trying to tell a story? Are you trying to write a poem? What are you trying to do with your writing, and are you effectively communicating the things in your writing that you are trying to communicate? I’m reading and looking at people’s writing and seeing if they are effectively communicating what they are trying to communicate and now that can be shaped and things like that,” she says.

Ito grew up in Edmonton, where she learned Japanese from her mother as a first language before learning English in elementary school. That bilingual background served to establish a love of the possibilities that languages hold at an early age.

“There was always this world of words, which always fascinated me. Expressing yourself in one language and in another really made me a writer,” she says.

Along with her three books of poetry, a memoir — The Emperor’s Orphans — and Floating Shore, a collection of short fiction, Ito has also published two works of translation with co-translators: Are You an Echo: The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko and Wonder-Work: Selected Sonnets of Catharina Regina Von Greiffenberg.

Not only does translation provide a creative challenge for Ito, but it also helps to keep her curious and inspired. She is currently at work on translating a second volume of Kaneko’s poetry into English.

“One thing that’s fascinating with translation is you get to swoop in and see how another language is with words or address certain kinds of concepts, and essentially poach from that. Having access to words of another language widens your treasury in English,” Ito says.

During her tenure at the Millennium Library, Ito will also have time to dedicate to her own works-in-progress — one of which is a novel she has been working on for years.

“It’s one thing to write certain things, but to get them published is another,” she says. “My poetry I got published, but it was a much longer and difficult journey to try and get a novel published.

“It’s a different kind of writing, too. I would like to finish it and hopefully get it published.”

Writers looking to book a consultation with Ito through the Winnipeg Public Library’s writer-in-residence program can visit winnipeg.ca/writerinresidence for more information.

sheldon.birnie@winnipegfreepress.com