Poet Natalie Lim: How ordinary moments become extraordinary poems

Writer and poet Natalie Lim

Poet Natalie Lim (she/her) is a Chinese-Canadian writer living on the unceded, traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Peoples (Vancouver, BC). She is the winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize and Room Magazine’s 2020 Emerging Writer Award, with work published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry 2020 and elsewhere. She is the author of a chapbook, arrhythmia (Rahila’s Ghost Press, 2022), and Elegy for Opportunity, her debut book of poetry, is forthcoming from Wolsak and Wynn in 2025. NatalieLim.com.

Poet Natalie Lim

On Creative Writing: What life experiences have shaped your writing style?

Natalie Lim: The most formative life experience that has shaped my writing style was discovering spoken word poetry on YouTube. Before that, I was interested in poetry but had never encountered a version of the form that I felt truly spoke to me and my experiences, or that moved me at the core of my being. Through the Button Poetry YouTube channel and poets like Sarah Kay, Shane Koyczan, and Rudy Francisco, I learned how the thoughtful use of rhythm, pacing and structure can make a poem come alive, and I carry those influences into my poetry both on and off the page.

What the small, intimate, and everyday can reveal to a curious and observant writer

On Creative Writing: Can you trace any common themes across your writing?

Natalie Lim: To date, my writing has been concerned with the small, the intimate, the personal and the everyday—and, by extension, what our everyday lives reveal about the world we live in and about humanity more broadly. I love to take topics that seem boring or ordinary and pull and prod at them to see what they might reveal.

Because my writing is personal, it is, of course, political. By way of video games and camping trips and Taylor Swift and NASA’s Opportunity rover, I want to open bigger questions about how grief and love intertwine to shape our time on earth, about the climate crisis, about feminism and social justice and what it would look like to live in a world that is kinder than the one we have created.

Natalie may not have entered contest if she'd researched winners!

On Creative Writing: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?

Natalie Lim: My first ever published poem was “arrhythmia,” winner of the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize. I submitted to that contest without really knowing its significance or expecting anything back. And to be honest, if I had done even a little bit more research about past winners I might not even have submitted at all! I have lots of complicated feelings about prize culture now that I’m more knowledgeable about the literary community, but I remain forever grateful to my former self for choosing to submit.

On Creative Writing: What advice/guidance would you give to writers?

Natalie Lim: Related to my answer above: never count yourself out in advance. Submit to the contest, the press, the journal, the reading series. You never know who might be on the other end of the email, waiting to receive exactly what you’ve written.

On Creative Writing: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

Natalie Lim: I often do a mixture of both. Some poems come out fully formed in a single session, and when it comes time to polish them up for submission, I look at them and think “nice!” and move on. Other poems take months of editing, deleting and reworking until I’m happy with them. That’s what I love so much about poetry—every individual poem is a unique journey from start to finish. Every time I sit down to write, there’s something new to discover.

Thanks to Riverstreetwriting.com for co-ordinating this interview with Natalie!