Poetry and Prose

Sachiko Murakami My quandary now is how to be a writer in 42 • 1 recovery, now that my survival isn’t so fundamentally attached to

writing. There is a part of me that wants the edge back,eleven thatdollars insistent,ninetyfive delirious,poetry desperate and tumble prose through language as though my life depended on it.

Billeh Nickerson I’m at the CBC Studios in Toronto being interviewed for Shelagh Rogers’s The Next Chapter. I read a few poems about fast food and then somehow Shelagh’s phrasing makes it seem as if she has just called me a slut on national radio. ‘Shelagh,’ I say, ‘my mom could be listening.’

Ayelet Tsabari How could one set of rules be right for all stories? For all fiction writers everywhere? Perhaps my writing had stood out as different because I was different.... My heritage, my background, had shaped my personality, which in turn informed my writing, not just in terms of content, but style as well.

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Manuscripts will be edited by one of EVENT’s editors and receive an assessment of 700-1000 words, focusing on such aspects of craft as voice, structure, rhythm and point of view. Visit eventmagazine.ca today Contents

Notes on Writing Anne Fleming Novels Are for Children 7 Chris Hutchinson What Remains in the Kingdom 13 of the Afterlife (Etc., and So On) Sachiko Murakami The Central Fact 23 Billeh Nickerson Shelagh Rogers Called Me a Slut 28 and Other True Stories Ayelet Tsabari How to Make a Cream Sauce 33

Poetry Darren Bifford Birthday Letter 38 Clint Burnham Two Poems 43 Louise Carson Christmas 1964 48 Margaret Christakos Banish 49 Mark Horosky From ‘Interiors’ 58 Armand Garnet Ruffo From ‘The Thunderbird Poems’ 62 Gillian Wigmore Two Poems 70 Changming Yuan Y: An Alphabetic Autobiography 72

Fiction Rachel Marston A Feeling of Home 73 Scott Randall And to Say Hello 81 Colin Snowsell Mann from Mars 94

Reviews Fiction Vanessa Blakeslee 102 Brenna Clarke Gray 105 Carol Matthews 108 Poetry Christopher Levenson 112

Books Received 116

Notes on Contributors 117

Donors’ Page 119 Cover: ‘Fireweed’ by Mark Mushet 2012. Smitten by a microforest of fireweed jettisoning tufts of silky, fibre-cloaked seeds in the air, I spent some time by the roadside near UBC last year to enjoy the scene on an overcast summer afternoon. It isn’t clear whether the image is warm or cold, of cotton or snow. It is a colonizing species, fond of open spaces and disturbed earth where there is little competition. Fitting on many levels. —M.M.—

Editor’s Note: Congratulations to the following EVENT contributors who are finalists in the upcoming 36th annual National Magazine Awards: Craig Davidson’s ‘Friday Night Goon Squad’ (41/2) in the Fiction Category, and Sina Queyras’s ‘The Dead Ones’ (41/3) in the Poetry Category. Keep your fingers crossed! Also, a big shout-out to Libby Zeleke, one of the winners of our Non-Fiction Contest last year, whose entry, ‘We Were Punk Rockers’ (41/3), was voted the winner of the Creative Nonfiction Collective’s 2013 CNFC Readers’ Choice Prize. Visit www.creativenonfictioncollective.com for more details. You can catch all the latest news from EVENT at www.eventmags.com. —Elizabeth Bachinsky

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Novels Are for Children

Here’s an essay I started in 2001:

A couple of years ago, I was on a plane reading a freshly bought book by an author I liked. I’d waited a year for the paperback. I had a Toronto-to-Vancouver stretch of time and a non-chatty seatmate. Ah. Settle into seat. Crack the spine. Read. Round about Saskatoon, halfway through both flight and book, I let the book drop to my lap and this sentence sounded in my head: Novels are for children. I will say it again: Novels are for children. I have a nephew who loves to read. Actually, I have several nephews who love to read, and a few nieces. But this one nephew is the kind of reading-loving kid who, when he opens a present on Christmas day and finds it is a book, will not be able to help himself opening the front cover and reading the first page. And, as he nears the end of the first page, he will not be able to stop himself fingering its corner and drawing it from right to left in a smooth and almost unconscious mo- 7 tion, revealing, now, page two (which to him is less a new page than a continuation of a stream), which will lead him to page three, and so on, until there are no more pages, or until the book is forcibly tugged from his hand and he is commanded to interact with his relatives. My father, his grandfather, used to give me a hard time about reading too much. What I think my father objected to was more complicated than he thought—he thought he was saving me from becoming anti-social and sluggardly, that a child should have plenty of outdoor play with others as well as short periods of interaction with adults and should not spend all her time lying on a bed or chester- field lost in a world that did not exist when the real world was right there in front of her to live in. What he really objected to, I think, was being shut out. Because when we speak of being lost in a book, of that delicious feeling of being immersed, the people around us are seeing someone lost to them for the time being. We all want to feel that we are interesting and important enough for the people we love to pay attention to, and so, when we walk into a room and our beloved son or daughter or lover or friend does not register at all that such a thing has happened, indeed has such a look of union, oneness with what’s happening in their brain as a result of reading marks on a page, that the mere possibility of someone walking into a room with them seems not to exist, we are more than likely hurt, maybe even angry. I never knew this1 until I saw this nephew with the book I gave him for Christmas, opening the cover and flipping past the front matter to page one, and being lost to us for the next three hours until the book was done. I had not seen him in a year. I was the one who had given him the book. In reading, we had something in common, and I would have liked to talk about that. But he was not available to me, as I was not available to my father, which I suspect was the real reason he turfed me out of doors time and again, bookless, to participate in things of this world. Sadly, this kind of reading—one of the chief, grand pleasures, nay, passions of my childhood, of my life—is now rare. Rare is the book I get lost in. Rare is the book that binds me to it absolutely, that drugs me. And that is why I found myself thinking, novels are for children. What I could see in the book I was reading on the plane was that had I read it when I had read less, I would have felt that glorious bond with it. I would have adored it. Alas, I had read too much. I saw too transparently how the novel was structured, where it was going and how it was intending to take me there. Understand, this was not a genre novel, not a mystery. It was a well-crafted, complex book by an accomplished author. 8 While I was reading everything I could get my hands on as a child, I never thought I would be a writer. I was not one of those children writing stories at age 9, my eye firmly on my future career. There are two parts to this, I think. One is that I had been fully convinced by the mythology surrounding writers that they were special people: geniuses. I don’t know how to say this to convey it adequately, but I had an idea that there was some mystical greatness to the people who wrote books, and even though I had a high opinion of myself, I knew that I was not within that category, just as I was not musically talented, though with a great deal of practice I could make myself seem so to people who weren’t themselves real musicians, just as I knew I was not an artist, although I sketched passably and took great pleasure in copying photos onto paper with pencil, charcoal or pen with a certain likeness. The other part of not even considering I might ever join the mythic pantheon of writers was demonstrated when as an undergraduate I tried to write my first semi-serious story (after an entirely flippant foray into fiction with a tale of an amoeba named

1 I knew it from the reader’s end. My first lover, when she saw me reading, always said, ‘They all die at the end, you know.’ This was a way of saying, ‘Stop reading. Pay attention to me. The book doesn’t matter.’ Then one time I was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. My lover said, ‘They all die at the end, you know,’ as usual. And then they did all die at the end. Boyd who oozed on down the road). I could not make anything happen. I could set up the characters and something of a situation, but I could not make anything happen. And I could not make anything happen because I could make anything happen. I could make them fall in love and stay together forever, or I could have one love another unrequited; I could kill them in the next paragraph, give them herpes, grudges, fortunes, poverty or a pet snail. I was paralyzed by the limitless possibilities, all the more so because one of the things I so loved about the books I loved was their inevitability. Even in the most episodic book, I loved inevitability. As a reader, I found it almost unbearable that Matthew should die (even now I can almost cry remembering how passionately I wanted Matthew not to die) in Anne of Green Gables. But Matthew had to die. It was necessary, it had to happen. Matthew, Anne’s gentle champion, had to die, or the book would not be the book and would not matter the way it mattered. For the reader, there was only one Anne of Green Gables, and in it Matthew had to die. For the writer, as I was now trying to be, there were more possibilities, among which lay the right one, the one that another reader such as I had been would feel was the only thing that could happen. But I didn’t know which one it was. I had no idea. And this was the other part of what had kept me—even before I actually tried it and came up against it face to face—from thinking I could 9 be a writer. I did not think I was someone who could discover the inevitable and right thing that had to happen to a character to make a perfect story, an Anne of Green Gables, a Little Women, a Wuthering Heights, a Bleak House, a Frankenstein, a Crime and Punishment, an Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, a World According to Garp, a Mill on the Floss, an As for Me and My House, a Jest of God, a Brideshead Revisited, a War and Peace, a Metamorphosis, an Age of Innocence, a Pale Fire, a One Hundred Years of Solitude, even a Baron in the Trees. Recently, I was talking to Jane Rule. She spoke of wanting to convey quite the opposite feeling that I am addressing here. She wanted to show characters whose experiences and actions the reader would not think of as inevitable, but just the way things happened to have happened. She wanted to imply that other things might just as easily have happened, only they didn’t. Actually, it’s not quite the opposite, since what I am talking of is less a sense of inevitability or fate in the lives of the character as in the mind of the reader. What had to happen to them in a novel is not what had to happen given the nature of fate, but what had to happen to them given the author’s sense of narrative. In the novels I have loved, it has always seemed that the author has made precisely the right choice. They have said, ‘It didn’t have to happen this way, but it did, and here it is. It could so easily have been cleared up, if only so-and-so had told such-and-such right away that her handkerchief had disappeared. But as it happened, so-and-so stayed mum, and here’s the consequence.’ How did it happen that I became a writer then? I’m still not quite sure. But I did discover, as so many have documented before me, that the paralysis waned the better I got to know my characters. I could make things happen after all. I still don’t know if they’re the right things, but they’re right enough. Point is: I did not always read like a writer. I switched. I stopped reading for what and started reading for how. (Well, what and how. How and what. They’re tied up together.) When I was a reader only and not a reader and writer, I was aware of narrative devices and mostly didn’t mind them. I often knew how something would turn out long before it turned out that way—and I could have told you why. When I started writing, I became hyperaware of what the author was doing. I saw what I had only sensed before, that all along the author had been making me like this one character above all others in order that when he or she died I would feel it the more. (Other readers would have known this all along.) That is only the most extreme kind of sentimental writing, it seems to me now, but even in much more sophisticated works, everything seems less 10 real and more constructed. I can see the puppeteer’s strings, the wizard behind the... Hmm. Novels are for children. And yet, in my love of narrative, in my love of narrative whose strings I don’t see, I can’t see a way to give it up altogether. I don’t want to give it up altogether. I want people to want to know what happens when they read a story of mine, not simply to wonder what nice sentences lie ahead. I do not know if I am capable of the kind of intellectual experimentation that I admire in writers like Donald Barthelme, Julio Cortazar or Nabokov. If I am not trying to be clever, I might someday fashion something that is interesting in that vein. Or I might never. It seems to me illustrative that of the titles that came to mind quickest when tossing off a list of novels in which I was at least once completely absorbed, many are essentially Romantic in nature and sentimental in execution. Many are 19th century, even if they weren’t written then. I no longer, for example, think that highly of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, although when I first read it at age 13 (taking it off my brother’s bookshelf, he saying quizzically, ‘I think you may be a little young for this,’ I pooh-poohing until I came to the anal-sex scene and admitted to myself he had a point), it was a rol- licking wonder with nose-snubbing, anti-establishment charm and surprise round every corner. ■ That’s where that essay stops, conclusionless. Why didn’t I finish it? Well, for one, I had no clear idea what I would do with it. Then, too, I was afraid I’d have to somehow fess up and name the book that had so stilled my reader-sense. Also: I had a lot more to say, many more books to parse, and no conclusion in sight. This, I sensed, was going to be a lifelong conversation with myself. Plus, there was something missing, something I had not yet got to that needed saying. All I’m talking about, really, is Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Sigh: ‘Oh, dear, yes. A novel must tell a story.’ Vonnegut’s ‘I don’t advise plot as an accurate representation of real life but as a way to keep readers reading.’ That old tension between narrative and life, between reader and belief in the story, between it mattering and not mattering. Wait. Did I really just say, ‘between it mattering and not mattering’? How did I get there? Never mind. That old tension between our need for story and our sense that story does not represent life as we know it, or that it does and does not represent life as we know it—the way Schrödinger’s cat is dead and not-dead at the same time. When I was first trying and failing to make my fakey-fake characters do things, I thought I had to ‘make it new’ (Pound, you bastard!). Many writers do this early on, I think, if I can judge from those that take classes with me. They want to defy convention, write a kids’ 11 book in which the children fail to save the world and remain forever enslaved, write a misanthropic fantasy in which the main character is an evil devouring bitch who cares about no one and no thing, write a quest in which the questers fail. I admire this impulse. Yeah! I want to say. Go! Gutsy or bust! But in my feedback, I’m all bouncing in my seat with the reasons the kids have to save the world, and the bitch has to have been likeable once, and so on. But that’s not really it. It’s that the kids can fail, the bitch can bitchify universally, the quest can fail—if that’s what’s really true, if that’s you, the author, the visioner, rendering the world you know. In the 12 years since my big Novels-Are-for-Children moment, I’ve solved nothing. I have done some of the experimentation I had hoped to do. I have written stories that I think have both compulsive narrative forward motion and no puppet strings. But I’ve relaxed a bit about the strings. I didn’t totally mean, even then, that ‘novels are for children.’ It was just a phrase in my head. Did I mean novels are for people who haven’t read very much? For people who don’t find narrative an irri- tating lie? Did I mean it in the Jackie Paper sense? The unspoken corollary of ‘novels are for children’ is of course that they are not for adults, but I did not mean it as an insult to adults who do read novels. I just felt a dissatisfaction with fiction. With novels. Which I write. I’m writing one right now and it’s happening all over again, my doubt and uncertainty, the wide open canvas of what I can do in this novel, the continual coming back or trying to come back to what’s true, what’s interesting to me, what matters. There it is again. What matters. The thing I was missing before. Here: I fear that fiction does not matter. And yet, I have a deep-seated and self-serving, doubt-infused faith that it does.

12 ChrisHutchinson

What Remains in the Kingdom of the Afterlife (Etc., and So On) Art is about something the way a cat is about the house. —Allen Grossman

I hesitate to assume to inspire or edify by telling tales of the various ways in which I have stayed alive, developed my mind, nurtured my soul, or sustained my creativity—if such a thing exists. I don’t put much stock in those kinds of narratives anyway. Let’s agree that Wordsworth’s Pre- lude—arguably the prototype of all such endeavours—arrives at something much greater than inspirational autobiography. (But where am I going with this? Who am I talking to? I am already lapsing, inflating my topic with a grandiose aside. My other tendencies, dear reader, are to embellish, fabricate, dissemble, conflate and flat out lie. What follows may or may not explain why.) My original reasons for wanting to take a go at the so-called writing life were not necessarily admirable ones, nor were they well thought out, and for the most part I have made my way in the world as a writer slowly, awkwardly and without much pomp or ceremony. Why 13 did I hear too late the sagacious words of Mrs. McLain, my Grade 4 teacher, whose admonitions have echoed through the years: If you’re too lazy to learn your multiplication tables, then you won’t be able to move up a grade and later in life when you don’t have a job, what will you do and where will you go when you don’t have any money? Poverty—I mean poetry—is my primary genre, and not always the easiest vocation to rationalize, even to myself, though I have been writing—working at it ‘seriously’—for about 20 years, long enough to have developed some serious doubts about the time spent. How can I justify the air moving through my lungs, the blood through my heart, the sweat through my pores? At times a terrible Voice sounds in my head, ‘Name one thing you can do, one thing you’re good at, one thing that’s useful!’ The truth is, I’m terrible at most things—or simply uninterested. I’ve proven this time and time again, and I can still get woozy thinking of all the jobs I’ve had to do and never want to have to do again. Bore- dom, irritability, restlessness, general ineptitude—these have been my muses, and the irrepressible sense that there must be something more, something better than this. As Sir Philip Sidney once put it in his famous ‘Apology for Poesy’: ‘Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature brings forth, or, quite anew, forms as never were in nature...’ But Sidney was a soldier and a courtier and a literary giant, not a deadbeat. He had the ethos of his religious and political convic- tions to give his fancies some heft, whereas my own digressions have too often chased after such golden superlatives and sad perplexities only to float away on the tail of an ellipsis, and vanish... The only other time I’ve become unmoored by an ambition to create ‘forms as never were in nature’ was when I aspired to become a close-up magician. Card conjuring was my forté and, after studying countless books and spending innumerable hours practising as- siduously in mirrors (note the typological similarities with the poetry practitioner), I became so adept I could arrive at a bar with nothing in my pockets but a deck of playing cards and leave having imbibed so many free drinks that I’d blank the next day on how I got home. I once bragged to a female co-worker about this, to which she replied that she could achieve the same result simply by putting on lipstick. Thus were my illusions shattered. More disillusionment followed. I soon dropped out of the University of ______where I had been an English Literature major. Despite having been deeply affected by many of the texts (especially those of Shelley and Keats) and although I had marvelled at certain of my professors’ wit 14 and eruditeness (while also detecting behind the professorial mask the spectre of a protracted frustration, the look of one whose accomplish- ments had come and gone without much ado), I could already sense the edges of the labyrinth which is the academic study of literature. To sit with and reflect on literature was one thing, but a career based on exegesis for the sake of publication and tenure, at this I balked. I was more keen on the enigmatic and ineffable qualities of poetry than on the circuitous intellections of ‘comprehending’ it, and had I read more T.S. Eliot I might have quipped, as I walked out of what I thought was going to be my last literature class, ‘Genuine poetry communicates before it is understood!’ But back then my final felicitous phrase as I turned my back on the hallowed halls was probably something like ‘Fuck this.’ (Though it’s true: I have recently reinserted myself into the matrix of academia as a means—albeit a meagre one—of survival. Every produc- tion of the medieval morality play Everyman needs someone to play the character of Knowledge, and having the haunted look of one who has hurled his youth into the grave of the mind I should be a shoo-in for at least the understudy’s part.)

It was at this point—in my early 20s, unskilled, my idealism clinging desperately to a robust naiveté—that I made the decision (god knows why—perhaps out of the need to recuperate the dwindling sense of my own significance) to devote myself to the creation of literary texts, regardless of whatever consequences might befall my financial and social well-being. I wanted to torture a confession from tenderness, to rewrite my life in lines publishable as art. It’s true, I was reading a lot of Henry Miller, and having no financial or social capital to lose made joining the Bohemian ranks a relatively risk-free operation. Besides, in my vivid imagination there was little difference between Victoria in the Nineties and Paris in the Twenties. If only Gertrude Stein had come to my rescue. Instead, I took the expert advice of Charles Baudelaire, and got drunk one balmy summer afternoon (more on wine and poetry than on virtue) and stayed drunk for the next 10 years. When I regained consciousness, it was to a not-so-extraordinary existence at the corner of West 12th Street and Nowhere in East Vancouver. I was living alone in a one-room apartment in a falling-down three-storey dump encroached on by a tangle of overgrown holly. The smells were of the old and forgotten: unseen mice nests beneath the water-damaged hardwood, oxi- dized copper, mildew and rotting plaster. The eyesore of the block, with its peeling paint and faltering frame, the house was an indelible remnant of pregentrification—a poetic anachronism! I had somehow crawled inside Carl Spitzweg’s painting, The Poor Poet. I had arrived. But how did I get there, exactly? 15 In the past decade, I had tried many things. I had attempted to rise with the rising Nineties, and I had failed. I had mastered the ‘One Art’ of losing, and I was getting good at losing more and losing faster. As Hor- ace once claimed, ‘The avoidance of mistakes leads to serious defects if one is lacking in artistic sense,’ but thankfully, I assured myself, I was nothing if not chock full of that! Besides, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—thus spoke Nietzsche (never mind that he contracted syphilis, cut off his walrus mustache, went insane and died). Undoubtedly there had been some errors of judgment. I had moved in some weird directions: I had worked as a walking sign board, a talking mannequin, a singing magician, a youth-hostel demolition expert and a canine clairvoyant; I had plugged away as a dish pig, a deck-shoe salesman, a wharf rat, a toast monkey, a shopping cart ninja and a scuba solicitor; I had slogged it out as a convenience store jerk, a Clark Kent impersonator, a class clown tutor, a 24-hour maintenance robot, a diesel maniac and an Internet dentist; I had busted my hump as a crooked line cook, a cod fish wrangler, a bastard barista, a bebop critic. And a porn poet... Etc. Yet in the off hours of my various careers I had also somehow managed to sneak back to school, reinventing myself, this time en- rolling in creative writing at the University of ______, and finally earn- ing my BA. The degree was perhaps more the happy side-effect of the fact that I found resorting to student loans easier than subsisting as a minimum-wage factotum. Unfortunately the degree, once in hand, practically guaranteed that I’d have to return to those very same jobs. Only now I had serious debt. So I avoided banks and wrote—time meandering in a mazy motion—until a miraculous thing occurred: My first collection appeared as a book with a bar code! Never mind art for art’s sake, here was a thing with an actual exchange value to be bought and sold on the marketplace. At long last, I was back in the black, on the map, a published author, a bona fide member of the literati—a real writer! I picked out a sweater vest and a cigarette holder and looked forward to exchanging double-entendres with Margaret Atwood on the CBC. I had started my journey in Bohemian poverty but it would soon conclude with cocaine dust and Venetian masks littering my Annex apartment’s marble floor. Or at the very least I’d finally get a Canada Council grant and pay off some of my new loans. No dice. My book soon appeared on the Amazon Best Sellers Rank as something like No. 1,023,479. (Take that, No. 1,023,480!) Then, for the umpteenth time, I was rejected by the Canada Council. Meanwhile, my friends started to go: suicides, overdoses. Mean- 16 while, each sunless winter in Vancouver felt more and more like the bottom of a well. I bought a happy light. I bought two. I asked, then yelled, for help. I counted the months and days and hours until spring. When spring arrived, I lay down on my decomposing hardwood floor in the accumulating dusk, my arms crossed over my chest as I listened to the silvery squeals from the street below from the children I imagined were chasing each other in endless circles, in ir- refutable delight, over wet sidewalks speckled with apple blossoms... And so on. Here’s the thing: In a healthy mind the act of waking will usually lead to the triggering of other actions, and how quickly and ef- ficiently will a normal person—charmed with élan, vitality, chi—flow toward the next purposeful activity, like yoga stretching, or the selection of socks, all the while driven by the impetus we all take for granted, until the morning it just isn’t there. No, my mind wasn’t right. There were mornings when light years appeared between my bed and my cornflakes, when, despite being able to conceive of several well-founded reasons to lift my head from the pillow, my body remained inert, heavy, while the pernicious thought occurred that to move would really make no difference at all. At other times my dejection would be supplanted by an anxiety as bright and angular as shattered glass. The thought of the difference of scale between my body’s familiar rooms—with its small comforts and possessions—and the ramshackle expanse of the external universe—with its butchers and gurus, its Christian Böks and Anne Carsons, its psycho wards and opera houses, its prison systems and income tax forms, its smelling salts and peacock feathers, its car bombs and insights into lucid dreaming research grants—would be enough to send shivers of vertigo from my toes up my spine and back down again, jarring loose two irreconcilable needs: to hide and to break free. I took pills, tinctures, powders, herbs and roots, but never found the right ones, not for me, not for any of this. I was borderline bi- polar—according to my Google-assisted self-diagnosis. Around this time I also become a hypochondriac. Money, I had none. Once, in the Social Assistance Torture Chamber, when the re- ceptionist gave me the number 666 on a blue slip of paper, I broke open and cried. And from my tear ducts spilled pearls and diamonds which fell to the ground and grew to the size of Michael Ondaatje’s head, and from my throat, streams of liquid gold flooded the room and everyone floated away, the shower-capped hustlers, the invidi- ous surgeons, the prize-less rhymesters, the shoeless would-be ush- ers and the lonely owners of home insurance policies set to expire 17 next week—all of them rose on my outsized self-sorrow and drifted toward the waffle-coloured ceiling where all became equal in the con- vergence of unmet desires... Yet I persisted. My motto was Always Be Writing. Come what may, when it came to writing I seemed to possess a perversely strong work ethic (coupled with the terrible habit of self-reproach). Half in love with phantasms, I memorized poems, including several of Blake’s hellish proverbs, such as ‘He who desires, but acts not, breeds pesti- lence.’ I read and read and read as a means to connect with something greater than myself. Not only poets, but theorists, biographers and historians began to talk and dance together inside my head. As my outer life faltered, my inner life intervened. The more desperate my material circumstances, the more I focused on my writing as a means of redemption. The more disenfranchised I felt, the more necessary it became to acquaint myself with the so-called great works. The more I endured external ruin, the more I shored up frag- ments of internal goods. Of course, I was a living stereotype and I was guilty of mawk- ish self-mythologization: a poète maudit—poor, suffering, possibly alcoholic? Yes, after a few gin and tonics I knew I’d been asleep my whole life now that I was suddenly awake to discover myself and my surroundings lit from within. After a few double scotches I could sense Rilke’s terrible angel watching over me, whispering lines into my ear. After a few more and a few more—prone to the habit of drift- ing off into any number of universes—perhaps I kept drinking to re- sist reading myself too closely. (Today, although I am sober, it must be obvious by now that I am still plagued by certain ‘lyric’ tendencies which tend to lead me astray.) Then one morning I woke up and, finally understanding the significance and function of Aristotle’s unities, commenced the author- ing of a prize-winning and best-selling novel. The End. Well, not quite. Instead I left town. Forever. Again. This time in pursuit of another university degree. The thing is, I knew a few other poets who had publications like mine, but they all had nice apartments and enduring love affairs to keep themselves afloat. They had the trappings of the bourgeoisie which I both loathed and secretly coveted. They had miniature schnauzers, lemon zesters, garage door openers, collections of rare vinyl that no one was allowed to touch, and an esoteric knowledge of the vicissitudes of the NASDAQ. They wore the translucent skin of the well-fed and the spiritually listless. More importantly they all had MFAs and teaching gigs. I wanted, I needed—what’s the difference? That I was sick of washing dishes in 18 pubs for free booze and a share of the tips—of this was I certain. So I moved to America, to the Vale of Tempe (Arizona) for money, sunshine (take that, seasonal affective disorder!) and professional- ization. As a poetry graduate student at ______University, I travelled to New York, Chicago, Hong Kong and Beijing, all on the university’s dime. I attended festivals and read at conferences. I learned to fill out travel receipts, to network, and to shift my personality and smile from Canadian subscript to American CAPS LOCK. Yet even though I was wearing houndstooth sports coats to AWPs and my apartment complex had an outdoor swimming pool lined with palmettos, I felt hollowed out. Amazingly, I missed my old Vancouver rooming house at the corner of West 12th Street and Nowhere with its ancient odours of decay. Suddenly, those were the days. Suddenly, a middle-class existence via the literary arts hardly seemed worth it. Why not? Because, as I discovered, the underlying values upon which the humanities have traditionally been based were being eroded by something called the neoliberalization of the public university—in other words: the bottom line. Because the dream to have one’s art translated into an assistant professorship was alive and well and walking around talking about movie scripts with James Franco. Yes, I watched as creative writing, as an academic discipline with its own unique history and pedagogical methods and practices, slowly choked to death on administrative bloat. I discovered that poetry could become the mere toy of careerism. If you don’t believe me, go and ask Franz Wright (he loves to beat that drum). I discovered that poetry could decorate the dinner table of the power that holds it hos- tage. If you don’t believe me, go ask Adrienne Rich (in the Kingdom of the Afterlife, where nothing’s ironic). When I was a child I could leave my body while asleep, rolling out of it slowly, then rising in the air, light as a dandelion seed. I’d drift around my bedroom, but when I tried to leave through the window, my head would always bump against the glass—which always woke me up. Similarly, I felt both weightless and trapped in my MFA program, suspended in a world of partitions, counterfeit light, obligatory smiles, small talk and such unnatural units of time. Yet, I survived the three years. I got through, and I was now ready to unleash some new work on the world. But the most important thing happened in my final year: I became romantically involved with a brilliant and beautiful American poet! I could write a whole trilogy about the benefits and dangers of becoming romantically involved with a brilliant and beautiful American poet, but if I did that, my romantic involvement might unceremoniously come to an end... So I’ll skip ahead. We moved to Vancouver, my new love and I. A job lured us to Kelowna, 19 B.C.. My second book came out and a few mixed reviews followed (but alas, there were no big awards or hand-written fan letters from John Ralston Saul). Another job sent us back to Vancouver. Then we took New York. Surprisingly, people seemed friendly in New York—unless paid to be helpful, and then they were mean. I found it was safe to look strangers in the eye, just long enough to take whatever it was I thought I might need. When my subway car jostled or swerved through a curve, emitting its singular shriek, I knew it was the viola from my favourite Velvet Underground song I was hearing. By Grand Central Station I broke down thinking of Elizabeth Smart. The clouds dissolved and the skyline shifted through its various geometric patterns and shapes. In my dream, half of Manhattan was dull firebrick-red and the other was grey and resembled the East River if the East River were crystallized iodine. Down by the East River I broke down and wept. Forty years back we might have lived on the Lower East Side with the rats and the poet-punk saints. But everything had changed since the Patti Smith era, and the city’s grit had spun off like kaleidoscope pixels, pollinat- ing the dust with shiny new dust. ‘New York,’ she said recently, ‘has closed its doors to the young and the struggling.’ (But what does she know?) We couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan so we moved to Brooklyn where we couldn’t afford to live in Brooklyn Heights, Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Cobble Hill, the north or east parts of Williamsburg or a thousand other such places, so we lived in Williamsburg’s Southside, Los Sures, east of the BQE. (At one time I thought I wanted to live in Patterson, New Jersey, though I knew little about Patterson, New Jersey, other than what I’d read in Williams and seen from above, flying into LaGuardia, so what did I know?) The scene—so I gleaned from discussions I eavesdropped on at various cafés on my visits to the other side of the BQE—eventually fled the Lower East Side and relocated just over the Williamsburg Bridge. But much of the neighbourhood, to everyone’s amazement and horror, was now an upscale-hipster Disney version of Bohemia. It was better to be in Bed-Stuy, or Bushwick, or any place with a razor-wire, bombed-out aesthetic. Save Brooklyn! That’s what the T-shirts said. Wherever I go I am always too late to avoid running into all these cosmopolitan reprobates. Wherever I go Gertrude Stein is always one step ahead. I wanted to find the underground literary pulse at the Centre of the Universe, but many of the readings I attended in Brook- lyn reeked of cliquishness and tittered with the self-importance of the lotus-eating trust-fund set. Every host, dressed up in the same 20 dirty yellow chicken suit, would claim to be the funniest poet on Twitter. How many asinine monodies could I hear about the death of a hot dog in Midtown? There’s nothing wrong with poetry about dead hot dogs or Midtown if you have the style and wit of Frank O’Hara. But O’Hara was long gone, and Ashbery now lived in Hudson. So I stayed at home, an aspiring curmudgeon, travelling backward in time, digging through palimpsest layers until I hit bedrock: Marianne Moore! Hart Crane! Walt Whitman! But when my prestigious under-the-table writing-content-for- adult-websites job came to an unexpected end, and because I was an illegal alien in New York, I had to leave. By this time my third book was out in Canada, and so I moved around and gave readings, subletting in Gibsons, Toronto, then Montreal. My girlfriend was still living in Brooklyn and working devotedly as a teacher in the Bronx, so here I was alone once again, adrift... Déjà vu! Different cities. Same Nowhere. Just like before. The specks which constituted my identity I imagined as grains in a photograph entitled ‘Another Portrait of the Colour Grey.’ I invented a bridge built from stones whose wet surfaces once serialized the river’s endless news. I saw myself ceaselessly traversing this bridge, back and forth, trafficking in images and sounds while ignoring the darkly flexing wat- ers beneath. Where was my childhood night vision? My thoroughbred lust? Why go on writing poetry? If I had a purpose, I supposed it was simply to continue without a purpose, to endure not only hardships but the widening fissures of such drab and artless hours as when the days’ regrets sucked the light from the corners of the room, engrossed in myself as one who tenderly prods a bruise. You’re a sad sack, the Voice would taunt, the first ever narcissist to suffer unrequited love! No doubt I needed some kind of force to push against, the slow disaster of a new obsession, otherwise this was all just gymnastics on the moon... And so forth, and so on. Dear reader, I expect you are getting a little tired by now. I am too. Why continue reminiscing, confabulating and wallowing in these—I admit—privileged indulgences? Do you have days like this, when you can barely stand your own company, preferring the presence of strangers or ghosts, when you wish you could look into the mirror and see only the mirror? There are days when I grow sick of my own voice, yet I continue, god knows why, to pretend that my voice is better than the Voice which tells me I have nothing to say. Perhaps I am obsessed with the loss of each outgoing breath, and with impossible schemes to reverse the process. Or maybe I’m just hoping to find someone to talk to. Skipping far, far ahead: Scientists have just announced that the newly discovered properties of the Higgs boson particle means that 21 in about 10 billion years the universe will implode at the speed of light. In a similar mood, W.H. Auden once claimed that ‘poetry makes nothing happen.’ At the end of the day, what human enterprise isn’t predestined to fail? Who can say? All this has been just to say: I haven’t wanted to argue, defend or proclaim anything here, but rather play the game of trying to explain myself to myself as if I were you, or you were me—or maybe just the two of us were sitting side by side. So thanks for listening. Sorry for the sleights of hand, hyperbole, digressions and this, my final failure to justify anything. You’ve been very patient if you’ve made it this far. I now live in Houston, Texas, where I am a PhD student in an English department which once welcomed James Franco as one of their own (and was rebuffed). What am I doing here? Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. Although my capacity to contain multitudes might have a slow leak. I’m 40. I’m still a sad sack. In the last five years I’ve gone through five jobs, eight cities, 13 apartments, and innumerable promises to become less self-con- scious and more spiritually aware. When all else fails, I turn to Wallace Stevens’s definition of poetry: ‘It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.’ Whether I am swerving away from or pressing back against reality, it’s hard to tell, though this much is true: I am presently finishing off what is turning out to be an unpublishable semi-autobiographical novella in verse. If that sounds funny, it’s because it should! Thankfully, I have been able to share my real life with a certain brilliant and beautiful poet—yes, she’s here with me now—a woman who knows and understands. Together we continue to attempt the great balancing act of writing and living, and living together. God knows how. God knows why. And on occasion, so do I. In parting, I’d like to offer this anecdote: Wounded on the battle- field, Sir Philip Sidney insisted on giving the last of his water to another injured soldier who was well below Sidney’s own rank. ‘Thy necessity is greater than mine,’ he is reputed to have said before turning to the composition of his own funeral poem, then falling down dead. Even if this story is a lie, it’s something to think about.

22 SachikoMurakami

The Central Fact The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry. — Jorge Luis Borges

I circle the block in my car, doing lines of cocaine off a CD case, gulp- ing white wine (no stains) from a one-litre tetra pack (it looks like juice, I reason, so it’s okay to drink it while driving). I am preparing to attend a poetry reading. It’s 2008. I will spend most of the reading gritting my teeth, waiting for it to be over, then I will corner someone at the bar and robustly natter at them, trying to: a) impress them with my mental acrobatics; b) confide in them how I’m sure everyone hates me; or c) insult them (and possibly try to make out with them). I will pass out in the morning and sleep through the weekend that I had set aside for writing. Borges, the central fact of your life may be the existence of words, but for me it is this: I am an alcoholic and a drug addict. Without that fact, there are no words. 23 It’s now 2013. I have been clean and sober for over two years; I am ‘in recovery.’ Most of my friends are recovering drug addicts and alco- holics. I occasionally invite poets over to my house, but I don’t let them drink there. I bring up recovery at bars and at barbecues, in meetings and at dinner. I’m totally open about my recovery, because my addiction was so totally apparent—why hide the fact of my sobriety? And I love my sobriety. I really, really do. I feel grateful that I haven’t had a hangover in over two years. I feel elated knowing the exact details of what transpired the evening before. I love my sober friends, who have become my family. I love feeling feelings, and working through the hard stuff of my life. But sobriety has ruined my relationship with writing. It has totally ruined it! I wrote my first book, The Invisibility Exhibit, in Montreal where I was anxious, depressed, nervous; the deep concentrative mode I get into while writing was the only way I knew to relieve the symptoms of mental unwellness. I found myself in a community—my cohort—for the first time in my life, and it was hard. I had no idea how to be a friend or how to manage a social life. I thought I knew how to participate in university classrooms, but grad school was a much different beast than undergraduate studies. And it was winter, so much of it was winter, my first Canadian winter away from Vancouver, and I was not dealing well. So I wrote. I unplugged the phone, I drew the blinds, I unplugged the Internet; I stayed up until 5 a.m., just me and my drafts. I disassociated, but, you know, productively. I wrote a manuscript. And when I was writing, all that confusion and fear couldn’t touch me. Language did for me what I could not do for myself: it gave me relief from myself. It gave me hope. As long as I could write, I would be okay. Seven years of university came to an end in 2006 when I handed in my thesis, and it was then that my alcoholic drinking and drug use crashed my life’s party. The problem was that I couldn’t write nonstop—I had to go out in the world. Most of my world in Montreal was a bar, where, thank god, they served alcohol. If normal people use alcohol as a social lubricant, I got so slippery no one could catch hold of me. Not even me. And cocaine! Cocaine let me drink as much as I wanted without throwing up or passing out, and it made other people way more interesting. The bar was great. I had managed to finally leave the house without terror. I loved that bar. I did my best to never leave. And when I moved back to Vancouver, I did my best to never leave the bar there, either. In fact, I carried it around with me in my purse. I brought the bar with me to the grocery store, to work, to the ambulance that took me to the psych ward, to strangers’ houses. And the more I carried the bar with me, the less room I had for language. During the two years that I now consider my long, 24 painful bottoming out, I didn’t do much writing—unless you count abandoned suicide notes, angry texts, lengthy emails apologizing for/blaming people for my behaviour, and cheerful status updates ‘writing’; unless you consider talking a lot about a writing project ‘writing.’ I wanted words, Borges, but I wanted a drink more. For the purpose of this essay, we can fast forward through the geo- graphical cures of Galiano Island (drunk there) and Toronto (drunk there, too), through the absolute terror of writing my second book, to 2013. Here. Now. I’ve replaced drink and drugs with recovery. I have found freedom from anxiety and depression. I’ve learned how to go out for dinner sober, how to go to a reading sober, how to hang out in a bar sober. Slow, mindful walking, daily self-care rituals, reaching out to connect with others, SNRIs; my recovery toolbox is full, and I have been well trained to pick up the phone before I pick up a drink. So I pick up the phone, I sit in coffee shops, I set my meditation timer and, by the end of the day, I am nourished, fulfilled and well. I feel well for the first time in my life. Recovery gave me a life of seren- ity, connection, a life full of love—a hopeful life. (And my need to dis- associate is fulfilled with Bejeweled; my top score in Lightning mode is 1,090,150.) There’s the rub: I needed hope; now I have hope. But I’ve not only replaced drinking with recovery, I’ve replaced writing with recovery. Consider this:

Ability to cope with life SOLUTION SIDE EFFECTS

2006 Nil Writing Isolation

2008 Nil Drink/ Although faster drugs and more effective than writing, also destroys ability to write (and cope with life)

2013 Not too shabby Recovery Drink/drugs no longer necessary; writing no longer necessary

So my quandary now is how to be a writer in recovery, now that my survival isn’t so fundamentally attached to writing. There is a part of me that wants the edge back, that insistent, delirious, desper- 25 ate tumble through language as though my life depended on it. This essay finds me in the process of reforming my relationship with writing. I’ve been trying to find writers in recovery to talk to about this, but it’s hard—there are way more musicians and actors. I listen to podcasts, I read memoirs. The best advice I’ve heard so far is to just show up for the work and let what happens, happen. But there’s another problem. My model of recovery holds the ego in high suspicion. Ego! The protected, isloated self and the self’s interest! The source of all my fear and pride, the engine that drives me to destructive drinking! It may seem like spiritual scare tactics, but I buy into it. My ego is my worst enemy, the voice that tells me that not only am I separate from other people, but that those people hate me and I should probably give up. Or try to destroy them. With my mind. My ego produces my suffering, and my suffering is what leads me to drink. But that same ego wrote my books, didn’t it? Is writing a selfish, self- interested, self-satisfying pursuit? I think so. I’ve never thought that I could help others by writing—god knows what kind of poetry that would produce. I’ve only ever written to satisfy my need to feel well, through my connection with language. But in order to stay sober and well, I need to surrender my obsession with myself and my little plans and designs. See the problem here? My recovery gave me my life back, but it also gave me the guilt that induces crippling writer’s block. Breathe, and show up. I’m showing up for a few projects now. One is Get Me Out of Here, in which I am writing poems based on other people’s observations and conversations in airports—an experiment in outsourcing inspiration. The second, Renderlings, began when I reached back through my digital shelves and found nearly a hundred poems I had started but abandoned from 2005–2012. They are very different projects, but they’re both addressing, in their ways, this little problem I am having with writing and with my ego. In Renderlings, I am working with this mistrust of my ego. I have some basic misgivings of the lyric position: the self expressing experience masterfully. If I can’t trust my self, can I be a lyric poet? This mistrust made Rebuild, my second book, in which I wrote lyric poems, then brutally tore them down, and rewrote/rebuilt them on the next page. In the poems of Renderlings, I’m trying to face the wreckage of my poetic past with faith in my ability to write, to recover the poems ruined by my addiction. Writing Renderlings is very much about showing up for the work and setting aside my fears (everyone will laugh at me; these aren’t interesting enough; they aren’t project- based; they aren’t risky enough): the very essence of the recovery 26 process, enacted through poetry. Meanwhile, in Get Me Out of Here, I am trying to invite people into my writing and to enact the writing of poetry in community rather than in isolation. If poetry is written in context and conversation, as I believe it is—every poem speaking to the poems written before it—then why not bring that idea further into my actual writing process? If it encourages my ego to open and soften, maybe my writing and recovery aims will align. Get Me Out of Here furthers the work of poetry-in-community that I began with Project Rebuild, an online collaborative poetry project. Project Rebuild (online at ProjectRebuild.ca) began by sending four iterations of ‘Vancouver Special,’ a poem from Rebuild, to poets, inviting them to ‘move in’ and ‘renovate’ the poem as they liked. I then posted the poems online, where any visitor to the site can ‘move in’ and ‘renovate’ any poem on the site. It’s an odd position to be in, to see ‘my’ poem gutted and repurposed by another poet. Stephen Voyce, in ‘Essay Title,’ asserts that ‘the challenge for twenty-first- century writers is how to create aesthetic objects that problematize, baffle, and defy the enclosures of intellectual property regimes.’ Pro- ject Rebuild is an experiment in enacting authorial connecting, influ- encing, interacting and reacting. In other words, it is an experiment in relaxing the ego’s clenched fist on authorship. I followed Project Rebuild with HENKO: A Powell Street Renga, an online renga created for the 2012 Powell Street Festival in Vancouver, a community festival celebrating Japanese-Canadian culture. HENKO invited people to co- create a poem, contributing their experiences of the festival and the festival site (Oppenheimer Park in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside). A poem about Powell Street—which has changed dramatically since it was the heart of Vancouver’s Japantown before WWII—needs many voices. A single poet singing of a single experience just wouldn’t cut it. The poetry structures of Project Rebuild and HENKO, the rebuild- ing of poems in Rebuild, poems written from conversations about airports, the tentative return to the lyric: all my writing grapples with the ego. The positive response to these projects—and I have a few more in the works—seems to tell me that my dissatisfaction with the ego has a place in 21st-century poetics. So, Borges, maybe the central fact of my life isn’t the existence of words any more, nor the possibility of weaving them into poetry. My life’s central fact is that of being a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. But it’s wrestling with that fact, it seems, that is making my writing possible.

27 BillehNickerson

Shelagh Rogers Called Me a Slut and Other True Stories

Shakespeare Never Did This, Victoria The Shakespeare Never Did This reading series shares a wall with a strip club. It’s hard to describe the venue layout, but basically the stage is separated from the club by a wall just thick enough to shield the reading series’ audience from the strip club’s noise, but it’s not thick enough to soundproof it for the poets on stage, like me. Tonight an American navy ship just happens to be in town. Even though I can’t see the strippers, I can visualize what sorts of moves the women are performing based on the sailors’ cheers (no small feat for a gay man). As I hear my own voice read the words from the pages I hold in my hands, I visualize horny sailors and the lovely sirens who en- rapture them behind the wall. For a brief moment, I consider stuffing my ears with cloth and candle wax, but that seems a tad extreme.

Hotel Arts, Calgary 28 I am reading to a group of strangers in a room at the Hotel Arts as part of Room Service: Poetry Between the Sheets at the Calgary Inter- national Spoken Word Festival. I feel just as much a bellboy as a poet as I oscillate between reading my poems and offering up pillows so the audience can get more comfortable. Everyone is sitting down and/or lounging on the room’s large bed. All my life I’ve fantasized about having a group of people on my hotel bed. This is not what my fantasy looks like. After the reading, I go into the bathroom to take home all the extra toiletries (once a thrifty poet, always a thrifty poet), but one of my audience members has already beaten me to the soap. This makes me feel a little sad. I thought my poems would be treasure enough. I get a shower cap though—a shower cap that I will use at home to cover bowls of leftovers in the fridge.

Random Acts of Poetry, Vancouver It’s my second time participating in Random Acts of Poetry, a nation- wide literacy event where poets read poems and give free copies of their books to strangers who believe the poets who approach them are trying to sell them something or lure them into a cult. I quickly learn that the easiest way to gauge whether someone will be open to a stranger reading them a poem is to look for people with funny socks—they are often much more open to random acts than people who make traditional sock choices. This strategy also feels less aggressive than reading to people in traction in hospital beds or folks trapped under hair dryers at salons. During this press stop in front of Vancouver’s City Hall (which is, admittedly, not very random), I am waiting to read a poem to Mayor Larry Campbell, the former real-life city coroner who inspired the hit television series Da Vinci’s Inquest. A newspaper reporter known for his Grinch-like takes on local events interviews me and keeps asking, ‘But isn’t this just a big gimmick?’ I mention something about the need for a little spectacle and literacy and how could he, as a newspaper reporter, not want more people reading and enjoying words, but he can’t seem to get over his per- ception that it’s all just a gimmick. I’m introduced to the Mayor, who compliments me on my red plaid pants, and I read a poem to him while photographers take pictures and the grumpy reporter stands in the background, off camera, frowning.

IV Lounge, Toronto

When I show up to read at the IV Lounge, the emcee is visibly upset and already a few drinks in. With every introduction he seems more emotional and his words get more slurred. During the short intro- 29 duction before my reading, my Spidey senses start to tingle. The host begins to weep onstage as he explains that a former featured reader—a dearly beloved poet—passed away just a few days ago. He weeps some more and then is unable to talk before mustering the energy to call out the dead poet’s name as he stands tall with his beer raised in the air like a Canadian version of the Statue of Liberty, then he announces a moment of silence and bows his head. After a few seconds he lifts his head as if nothing unusual has happened, and screams, ‘Our next reader is Billeh Nickerson!’

The Western Front, Vancouver The spoken-word artists all show up late and read for far longer than they should. It’s 30 degrees inside and the old converted union hall doesn’t have air conditioning. People keep fanning themselves with their hands and try to pull their moist clothes away from their bodies in a discreet manner, which is difficult, especially for the men. It’s almost 11 p.m. by the time I get onstage and I am beyond pissed off. In what I must admit is a dream come true, I walk on stage, thank the audience for sticking around and then proceed to admonish the readers who didn’t stick to their allotted time as tonight was the last night my elderly grandmother with terminal cancer was able to see me perform, but when everyone read long she had to leave. This is, of course, a big lie, but well worth the dishonesty.

Pride Coffee House, Victoria I am supposed to read just after a lesbian bongo player who wears a white muscle shirt and seems to be in a trance as she hits her bon- gos and sways her body to the rhythm. She keeps chanting, Feminine protectSHUN, feminine protectSHUN, feminine protectSHUN, then stops and stares dramatically at the audience and whispers, What are they protecting us from? She repeats this over and over again. This is the same venue where I once saw a drunken man recite awful rhyming love poems before turning his back to the audience, dropping his pants and spreading his ass cheeks to everyone. While I do not in- tend to moon the audience, I am nervous about how well my poems will go over with the feminine protection crowd. But it turns out to be a fun night. Thankfully neither I, nor the audience, end up needing protection.

The Word On The Street, Vancouver 30 I’m reading for Poetry in Transit on a BC Transit bus parked outside the Vancouver Public Library. I stand in the open space near a side exit door while my audience sits on bus seats and crane their necks to see me. As I read my poems, I think about how this is the widest room I’ve ever read to. Instead of trying to project my voice outward toward my audience, as I’m used to doing at coffee shops and the- atres, I feel as if I’m spending a lot of my time moving my head back and forth between the distant ends of the bus. I imagine this is how it feels to be a tennis umpire. Just as I start to feel comfortable reading on the long bus, I hear a strange sound that is part sigh and part guttural moan. A large, mentally challenged man walks onto the bus. He walks closer and closer to me until he is standing only inches from my face. I’m not sure what to do, so I just keep on reading even though the audience can barely even see my head. Once I get to the end of my poem, the man grunts, then leaves. I like to think his dis- pleasure stems from the bus not going anywhere, but it’s probably that he just hates my poems.

The Dufferin Pub, Vancouver A half-naked man who is obviously one of the strippers for Skank: An Evening of Questionable Taste walks up to me and says, ‘Hello, my name is Peter, would you like to see my Polish sausage?’ in an accent that I am initially uncertain is real or not. Later on in the evening, I realize he is actually from Poland and talks that way all the time. When my co-host for the evening leaves the green room, Peter runs full tilt and slams me into the wall before kissing my face and rubbing himself up against me. Moments later, my co-host realizes he’s forgotten something and opens the door to see me making out with Peter. ‘Billeh Nickerson, you whore!’ he screams. No matter how hard I try to explain the wall-slamming, the unexpected ‘Polish sausaging,’ I am unable to convince him of my innocence.

Ridgeway Elementary, North Vancouver

I’m reading a poem over the PA system at Ridgeway Elementary School in North Vancouver, where I’m sharing a week-long artist residency with writer Shannon Stewart. We are the first resident writers after a previous resident dancer and a totem pole carver. Even after all these years, I am still nervous in the principal’s office. I read a poem about giraffes wearing turtlenecks. Later, one kid asks me how a giraffe can have a neck like a turtle.

Ginger 62, Vancouver 31 It’s Arsenal Pulp Press’s anniversary reading at Ginger 62, but it’s also just a few days after two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. There have been questions as to whether Arsenal’s event would even take place. Everyone keeps talking about how it’s the end of irony and how the world will never be the same. Irony is my bread and butter. I’m not sure what I think about those claims, though I do decide it will not be a good idea to read my poem ‘If You Fit All Your Lovers in an Airplane What Kind of Airplane Would It Be?’ I tell myself I’m not self-censoring. I’m just being sensitive. It takes me years before I feel comfortable reading that poem again.

The PNE, East Vancouver I’m one of seven poets staging Haiku Night in Canada at the Telus Main Stage at the Pacific National Exhibition, a reading where two teams of poets read haiku about hockey at each other while another poet referees and keeps score. We’ve performed this schtick many times, though this is the first time we’ve performed outside a literary festival. It’s strange to see poets dressed up in hockey gear, complete with fake black eyes and mouth guards, but not as strange as when a parade of exuberant young people dance past the stage to a cheesy song about cultural diversity. At first glance I wonder if they are sponsored by Up with People. Maybe they are Up with People. Our audience consists of half-curious, exhausted parents of rambunctious children who all sit around the grassy knoll in front of the stage. At the start of our reading, the audience stands for the national anthem just like they would at an NHL game, then we begin.

Berton House, Dawson City I’m standing on the lawn behind Pierre Berton’s childhood home in Dawson City, Yukon, where I’m the writer in residence for the summer. There’s a big party going on, complete with a gazebo-like canopy tent and a bunch of curious residents and tourists who have come by for free food, the chance to tour the house and, possibly, just maybe, attend an author’s reading. I’m also less than a hundred metres from the Robert Service cabin, where Parks Canada tour guides recite Ser- vice poems and answer questions from tourists who, for the most part, have thick American or German accents. I’m supposed to give my reading and then announce three winners of gold nuggets for a writing contest sponsored by the local tourism board, but I am preoccupied with the fact that the public gets to tour around the house as part of the festivities. Even though I’ve only stayed in the 32 house for a few weeks, it feels like I’ve just given my notice and my landlord wants to show my place to prospective tenants. Perhaps my nerves stem from an incident a few weeks earlier when a couple who thought the house was a museum walked in on me wearing my ginch and I had to ask them to leave—twice. I wonder if one day my apartment in Vancouver will become a celebrated national treasure.

The Next Chapter, Toronto

I’m at the CBC Studios in Toronto being interviewed for Shelagh Rog- ers’s The Next Chapter. I read a few poems about fast food and then somehow Shelagh’s phrasing makes it seem as if she has just called me a slut on national radio. ‘Shelagh,’ I say, ‘my mom could be listening...’ Shelagh gives a call out to my mom and, after the interview, one of her assistants tells me she’s never heard Shelagh say ‘slut’ on the radio before and even my cousin who’s a CBC producer in Win- nipeg comments on the interview. ‘Hey, are you the poet Shelagh Rogers called a slut?’ a stranger asks me at a party a couple of weeks later. ‘I liked your poems.’ AyeletTsabari

How to Make a Cream Sauce Damn the rules, it’s the feeling that counts. — John Coltrane

In my 20s I was known among my friends as a good cook. I loved trying out new ingredients, enjoyed sharing my creations and was not afraid to experiment. Then I got a boyfriend who leaned over my shoulder in the kitchen one day and said, ‘ This is not how you make a cream sauce.’ ‘I know how to make it,’ I said, chopping my parsley with a little more vigour than necessary. ‘I’ve been making it for years.’ My boyfriend explained that a properly made cream sauce had to be simmered and constantly stirred, that flour couldn’t be just tossed in at any time, that you must use unsalted butter. As our relationship developed, we got into a few more quarrels in the kitchen. My boyfriend, it turned out, was a pro: he owned measuring cups; he knew the difference between mincing and dicing; he followed recipes while I considered them a loose guideline, relying on instinct and in- tuition. The more I listened to him, the less I wanted to cook. My con- 33 fidence was shaken, which became evident in my meals. When I tried following recipes in a precise manner, the results were often dull. Something was missing. Eventually I stopped cooking altogether. About three years ago, I came across an article titled ‘ Ten Rules for Writing Fiction’ on The Guardian’s website: a compilation of rules offered by established authors on what to do, and more importantly, what not to do when writing fiction. I had heard most of these rules before in writing classes or books, and found many of them helpful at some point or another. But this time the list presented me with a de- tailed catalogue of my failings as a writer: times when I used adverbs (a mortal sin! according to Elmore Leonard), or ‘then’ as a conjunc- tion (inexcusable, says Jonathan Franzen), let slip an exclamation point (Elmore Leonard again) or a cliché (Geoff Dyer). The list was like my boyfriend’s cream sauce recipe: it made me want to quit. As a kid and a teenager, I wrote daily—in class, on buses and on street benches. Later, as a reluctant soldier in the Israeli army, I secretly typed my fiction on the army’s computer, using the fax machine (meant for top-secret army documents) to circulate my short stories amongst my friends at other bases. Fiction was my refuge, the ‘Happy Place’ I escaped to when things sucked at home/at school/in the army, which (given my age) was often. At 25, I moved to Canada. I lived in Vancouver, worked as a wait- ress and spent most of my days stoned, contemplating my two lan- guages: my adopted English, too new and clunky and unfamiliar to write in, and my native Hebrew, now too obscure and no longer useful. I sank into a textbook Generation-X quarter-life crisis and ended up not writing at all, spending the following years mourning the loss of my craft (a wordsmith stripped of her tools!). I was being a big baby about it. So, by the time I found my way back to writing and enrolled in some community college writing classes, it had been years since I’d had a regular writing practice. This, paired with the challenge of writing in a new language, led to bouts of anxiety and insecurity. Still, I stuck it out: I signed up for more classes, joined writing groups and eventually workshopped my fiction with other emerging writers. Soon I began to notice a recurring theme in the feedback I was receiving. I was often told that my sentences were ‘too long,’ my dialogue ‘too direct,’ my sex scenes ‘too graphic,’ my images ‘too sentimental.’ Some students simply scribbled ‘ Too much!’ in the margins of my stories. Determined to become a better writer, I began studying Canadian texts and tried to emulate their style, changing the way I wrote to fit what I thought to be CanLit standards. I read books about craft, 34 adopting their principles as gospel: show, don’t tell; never introduce a new character in the last third of a story; be sparse when writing sex scenes (or better yet, avoid them altogether). Every teacher with whom I studied had different rules they lived by, all of which I added to my list. Some preached against flashbacks and back stories, others against using the present tense. The idea of guidelines that I could follow comforted me, made me feel as though the art of fiction was more tangible, a skill I could acquire and perfect. As Carol Shields says in her essay ‘Arriving Late, Starting Over,’ these rules offered ‘the short story as boxed kit, as scientific demonstration, and furthermore it was teachable.’ I was a good student, and I succeeded in forcing my fiction into submission. I told less, added in subtext, obliterated all adverbs. I wrote polished, sparkly short stories with punchy dialogue and per- fectly structured plot lines. The responses to my new fiction were mostly positive, though not overly enthusiastic. I was short-listed for a couple of contests but hadn’t managed to publish any of my stories. Moreover, I began to feel a growing void in my life, a longing for the way I wrote as a child. Something felt wrong. Something was missing. In her essay ‘Fail Better,’ Zadie Smith describes a fictional writer named Clive who publishes a novel he knows, in his deepest of hearts, is ‘not true.’ I felt that way about much of the fiction I’d produced during this time. My writing was stiff, calculated, constrained. My para- graphs were overwrought, my sentences neat and tight. My stories may have followed the rules, but they were stripped of a personality, a soul, a heart. Even worse: I was no longer having any fun. Carol Shields describes how she became disillusioned with what she calls ‘the phantom set of rules about what a story should be and how it must be shaped.’ As a teacher, she had passed on these inscribed truths to students until a case of writer’s block led her to question the traditional short story, that ‘fixed phenomena governed by established definition.’ She decided to let herself experiment with other narrative possibilities. The result was the short story collection Various Miracles, published in 1985. A lot of Shields’s experimentations had to do with form. Unlike Shields, I have always been fond of the traditional story arc; I nat- urally write stories with conflicts, climaxes and resolution; this is often the way stories present themselves to me. Still, I could relate to Shields’s disillusionment. I wondered what it was about my fiction that my peers had found ‘too much.’ What was it about my writing that didn’t translate? And why was it that following rules didn’t lead me to better fiction, but rather to a strange feeling of falsehood and self-betrayal? 35 ‘Writing is the craft that defies craftsmanship,’ Zadie Smith says in ‘Fail Better.’ ‘Craftsmanship alone will not make a novel great.’ She goes on to say, ‘A writer’s personality is his manner of being in the world: his writing style is the unavoidable trace of that manner. Style is a writer’s way of telling the truth.’ In his essay ‘Rhyming Action,’ Charles Baxter, an American, notes the difference between American writing and writing that comes from Eastern Europe or Africa, which tends to be more obsessed with patterns and rhyming action. ‘If we lived in Poland or Bosnia,’ Baxter suggests, ‘overrun for centuries by invading armies or warring fac- tions, we might very well believe, as Polish writers have tended to believe, in the semitragic nonprogression of large historical events.’ Baxter then clarifies, ‘I’m not just talking about narrative technique here anymore. I’m talking about the way some writers may view the world. Technique must follow a vision, a view of experience. No technique can ever take precedence over vision. It must be its servant.’ By strictly adhering to a set of rules and changing my style I’d been going against my nature and so I was no longer telling the truth. Rules had never been my strong suit to begin with: I had been an unruly soldier in the Israeli army, terrible at following orders, racking up nine trials for violating military codes and nearly ending up in jail. In high school, they invented a behaviour grade especially for me, threatening twice to expel me for breaking school regulations. And how could one set of rules be right for all stories? For all fiction writers everywhere? Perhaps my writing had stood out as different because I was different. More often than not, I was the only writer in the group with English as her second language, often the only one who wasn’t born or raised in Canada. I was definitely the only one from Israel, the only one of Jewish Yemeni descent. My heritage, my background, had shaped my personality, which in turn informed my writing, not just in terms of content, but style as well. Many of the rules I struggled to implement in my fiction made no sense when situated in an Israeli context. In one fiction class I had been taught that dialogue must always have subtext, that people always say one thing and mean another. I thought that to be the strangest thing; in my culture people often say precisely what they mean, whether you want to hear it or not. There were other glaring differences: Israeli literature is less conservative when it comes to sex, just as you are more likely to hear the sounds of lovemaking from apartment windows on a hot summer night in Tel Aviv than you are in Canada. Israeli writing tends to be sentimental, often verging on melodrama, because Israelis are passionate people who prefer watching Latin-American telenovelas 36 over American soaps, seeing themselves reflected in the Latin temper- ament. Israeli writing often has a nostalgic, sometimes sombre tone, a sense of longing, a tendency to rhyme images and events, because Israel’s collective history—a series of tragedies, a succession of wars— haunts their present. My past, my cultural history, the collective memory of my people, was threaded throughout my stories, reflected in my themes, my style, even my word choices. Perhaps this is the reason I’ve always gravitated toward a traditional narrative arc, with its emphasis on conflict and resolution.

In 2009, I moved across the country to attend an MFA program in Toronto while still having doubts about my choice to pursue writing. On particularly bad days I entertained thoughts of quitting altogether. Perhaps, I thought, it was time to admit defeat, accept my limitations, embrace my shortcomings. Perhaps waitressing (I was always so good at it!) was my true calling. One spring day a brilliant teacher who read my floundering stories told me she wanted more, not less. It was our first meeting, our first consultation. She was sitting on the couch in my Parkdale apartment; the door to the balcony was open, perhaps for the first time that year, and the air was fragrant with rain. ‘Maybe you can insert a flashback here?’ She pointed at my marked manuscript. ‘A little more back story?’ I burst into tears. She stared at me. ‘Are you crying because I asked for more back story?’ Under my teacher’s guidance I started reading fiction written by African, Latin American and Asian writers. Reading these books, I was reminded that beyond the confined space in which I had impris- oned my writing, there was a world where other fictions existed. It gave me hope, made me believe that there was room for my fiction in that world. The first story I wrote after that was set against the Lebanon War and written in the voice of a nine-year-old girl. It came to me in one sitting, a long exhalation, without stopping to edit or judge. Somehow it ended up requiring less drafting than other stories I’d laboured over. It was this story, which I had written recklessly and joyously (probably throwing in an adverb or two) that was finally accepted for publication in a literary magazine. My fiction was receiving better responses in class workshops too. The same teacher whose lukewarm reaction to my writing had contributed to my frustration in the beginning of the year, now com- mended my stories for being refreshing, for having ‘energy,’ and everyone seemed to love the sex scenes. For the first time in years, I felt as though I owned what I wrote. I owned my voice. 37 By the end of the following school year, I had 11 stories which I submitted as my MFA thesis. That thesis was later picked up by HarperCollins and became my first book, The Best Place on Earth. But emerging writers must learn technique!—I can hear teachers of writing protest—the same way beginners in other disciplines learn from successful practitioners of their craft. I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Nor do I blame my peers or teachers for their critique of my writing. I was a novice writer; I’m sure at times my sentences were too long; my writing was ‘too much.’ It was really my own need for control that drew me to seek rules. Fiction had felt like a labyrinth and I was desperate for a roadmap. This was the journey I had to go through, with its false starts and near defeats, in order to become a better writer. I had to learn skills, absorb the technique, practise it in those early stories I’d shelved (as many early stories should be), and then I had to let go and trust that the knowledge would remain, that these principles would emerge in my writing intuitively, organically, the same way I just know to add rock salt to the sautéing onions to keep them from burning, can sense when my hummus is done by observing its texture, and that my Yemeni soup is ready by the way its fragrance permeates the house. DarrenBifford

Birthday Letter to Ian Orti

[1]

Ian,

You know November in Montreal. It’s like that now, exactly: cold and clear, sun up, bare trees, leaves everywhere. All in all

it’s easy to walk around so long as you prepare for sudden shifts in weather, quick turns in temperature. Ice-rain, sleet, snow: each share

our fates. Today is the end of my thirty-fourth term on earth, my birthday. This is my birthday poem! It’s an annual ritual, how I mark the debt earned

38 by being here, kicked, like you, by confusion. The same creditors hound our middle age: the problem of desire won’t flee: the loan

it sharks is us. Is this, though, a new stage? Do years follow one after another or are they built together like words on a page

form into a story and show a life better than each discarded moment? Wait. You’ve no time for high-flown bullshit—I’d do best to remember

that for you decorum involves mostly what we mime with our lives but don’t pretend to speak or know. But maybe you snip your tongue too often, too fine,

so that we listen as if over an old rotary phone to a second party line and the voices are muffled, almost background static but still obviously human.

It’s easy to break a rhyme, to complain we’re shackled by the constraint of repetition. Each day, we fear, is a drab repeat and drudge, consecutive but diminished. (In this way you fear the aged locals staggered at the bar in the middle of the afternoon, drunk by 6 o’clock, because one responds to your name. You’re sure, for a very weird second, that he’s you and drop by accident your pen in your beer.) Ten years ago I feared—still now the same fear—the graceless stop, stuck in the rut of an uneven rage, the muted blow of having forgone that risk, as Socrates urged, to be the world’s fool and seek what we don’t know.

We never talked, though, about Plato, who I read years before we became friends. November, late fall, turns me onto Platonic moods. That we’re fed otherwise than by bread alone is a faith I got somewhere, 39 now lodged in me like a nursery rhyme among so much daily news from the Globe and Toronto Star.

What am I to make of it there? From that cave flung into daylight, Plato had his hero stumbling around blind until his eyes adjusted to that brightness where birds sang and he was all alone, uneasy in the lasso of wind. Maybe it’s a place to which he’s gone or maybe it’s his room after dinner or early in the morning when the hours find him unoccupied with trades and chores and things to do. The clear view from above is not forever, I suspect. I suspect we are alone in sudden visions. However true they are, we return to the kitchen. How not to defect either to one side or the other but strike an edge in the distance between the two—and reject neither transcendence or the daily drudge? The ledger I imagine we keep is parsed in hours, according to year. The question ages like Scotch. You’ll uncork it, a pledge to your daughter and the woman she’ll one day be— as if all at once. You’ll love her with a fear so great it’ll mark the exact outline of your life.

[2]

You’d probably not guess as you’re reading this but I’ve taken this poem to the Bagel Etc. for breakfast and I’m sitting over hot black coffee—it’s a bliss

that’d garner no great admiration from a saint or from those who leave cities in search of mountains, living rugged and away. What way of life is best?

I don’t know but I think the question remains, 40 that we’re rudderless if we don’t ask it. Yet school often missed our real need. Books weren’t to blame

if they were jimmied into hypotheses and material for exegesis. Books meant always otherwise: sudden love and up all night at dawn, entirely physical

your attraction to the first woman whose eyes you mapped and skin you smelt like rank leaves, a sort of rot to your innocence—you loved and despised

at once and learned what you knew of flesh, believing in impulse, a real pain in the heart, and so many years of desire like whiplash after a crash—until finally fucking,

utterly disappointed. Maybe one day you’ll go for a beer with that girl you knew. Maybe you’ll meet her at a dive on Johnson Street. And that’s the last you’ll see of her.

What then shall we say of Romanticism and its prize —what? A young life made more abundant? Or kicks repeated and city and city and city and city, never standing still? Now you’ve a child in the mix, and her mother, who you barely knew before conceiving; I married. Our early-twenties Doubles would be sick, daring us not to redo the cycle of becoming, unrecognized by our earlier ideal expectations. But what refuted what? Your kidney refuting you for most of a year, you pissed blood. Intimations of...? I lost my appendix suddenly last summer, close to bursting. I wheeled around the institution and received pity from patients much sicker than myself. I might have died, or you. We’ve joked about what we’ll say at the funerals of one another, what song will best sing either of us when we croak. 41 ‘Croak’ is a dumb rhyme, I know. I mean mortality matters; it works on us like meaning works in poems— not the time part but the way the entirety of a season, its cold or heat, handles everything at once. Calendar dates, like my copies of The Economist (with reason) stacked out of sight in a pile, one year then another accumulates. So if I stash my youth into a single day? Or the few years I’ve loved as if into a decade so dear that I cannot see behind it or beyond? But how to stay in a single place, to live as if it were home, by a love not nomadic? Even the attempt to say this much must try your patience. I won’t crow for too much longer. At thirty-five I’m taking a shot at early midlife reckoning, with no guide to show the way further on. Unlike the kid I was, I’m caught by what I’ve snaffled of love—hence the mystery. This autumn, for instance, I’ve listened mostly to Bach, especially his ‘Partita No. 2’ in C minor. It strikes me that the question I’ve asked, about how we should be, which life is better, ought to be thought of as polyphony,

one desire counterpoint to another. Probably I’ve said too much, or not enough, both inadequately, a hell of a theme for a poet. So enough already.

It’s getting late. Iris is drinking wine at a work party. She just called. In the old days I’d be calling you to grab a pint at the Precinct. Which reminds me.

November 6th, 2012

42 ClintBurnham

Tragg’s Choice 2 you’ll do fine someday you’ll be important what you need is a drink and some lamb stew what they’ve got upstairs is gas station drip coffee best shadow job I’ve ever done incidentally it’s got a bum tube—static is terrible you keep feeling that don’t you? I’m glad you followed me Wyoming, just you and your pal the doc yeah I’ve always been a cornmeal man myself how about you, you ready for surgery? 43 how we gonna look getting back to shy without a set of horns? course, I suppose 20 years does make a difference we’ll take you into moose well we’ll get this straightened out and everything will be fine and dandy don’t forget dandy

3 a.m., time to call on a model Compton model agency you’re the most wanted man I know the alps of the Americas, that’s what they’re known as you’re getting a little monotonous with the take-me-in routine and I’ve watched you ordering dinner now maybe we can put each other on the starting line, hunh? what are you gonna do with your money red? set up a scholarship at Harvard why don’t you like me?

I I I gotta know, I gotta know real bad the great Canadian ending—death by snowplow let’s go keep it company

44 K’omoks for Pete Culley

Brooklyn Creek meowy xmas woofy doyear Millard creek Royston Comox Logging Road Comox Lake Nymph Falls Roy Creek Trent River Grassi Point Spindrift Union Bay Dorothy Rd. Ship’s captain said he’d steam half-way round the world for a load of 45 Comox #2 coal Beaufort Washer Lansdowne Hindoo Creek Mar Vista E&N Buckley Bay T’Sable River Cougar Smith Rd. Cowie (Cougar) Creek Closed for the Season Seasonal Fir Bobcat & Septic Frontage Waterloo Creek Rosewall Log Sort Berray Rosewall Creek North McNaughton Creek South McNaughton Creek Sensitive Habitat Cook Creek Chef Creek Thames Creek Nile Creek Spider Lake Horne Lake Kinkade Creek Little Qualicum River Except Maintenance and Authorized Vehicles Ocean Blue Plumbing dirtbikes or quads Whiskey Creek Crocker Crab Hi Al, Hi Tubbs Bike route Cross here when safe 46 French Creek W. Morningstar Cr. E. Morningstar Cr. Bridge Ices Aircraft Patrolled Wade Stewart Tree Service No Hitchhiking Pickup Is Illegal Avoid Hydroplaning Nanoose Bay Peace Camp Bully’s Turf Farm Fredheim Mid-Island Kaspar Nanoose Creek Nanaimo Jim.Com Barrel Creek Lean-to on the lean-to on the Western Front Susan Forrest To report a forest fire call 55* Outstanding Ocean View Executive Home False Gabriola Symptom Nanoose Overhead Tsow-Wi-he-Nam Snaw-Naw-As Wancliff Grey Sea From Merville to Lantzville & back again the Harbour City Mary Ellen Marantha Fukeneh or Fukenhi Rock City

47 LouiseCarson

Christmas 1964

We roamed around the brown, sedate townhouse. We’d just eaten our first gingerbread hut. We’d been dressed up and shown off to a row of relations: incidental aunts and great aunts, their grace made redundant by war, their improbable names Gladys, Iris. Dusted and arranged, out of the usual, they held thin-walled bone china on their laps.

Now we roared, clattered. I wandered upstairs and opened a door to a room I’d not yet imagined, where, alone with his books, his temporary effort to abstain, Uncle Albert trembled and shook. No word, no look, lost on a darker plane, unheard. 48 MargaretChristakos

Banish

Banished. Abdehins. Ba ni sh ed. De. Hs. In. Ab. B______d. _anishe_. __nish__. ___is___. Ban__hed. _an__he_. _a___hed. _a__sh_d. ____sh__. Ba_____d. ____she_. _____he_. B_____e_.

49 2. Wash

Go 2 an in-spot n ask 4 callous remover. Show yr skin. Wash yr skin. Take away some of it [yr skin], then swab with rubbing alcohol. Waft yr scent when leaving.

50 4. Wish

Every leaf on that tree looks like a small hand typing. Suddenly the tree seems entirely inflamed with confession! All of nature a diarist.

2 banish. 2 vanish. 4 one or the other, 2 wish.

57 MarkHorosky

from Interiors The I, the it, and the the —Bob Perelman

Occasional. Ly.

And then mention, rain.

Taking apart sentences, the phone is a construction of insularity.

I’ve is less I have & more I’ m under the

influence. Or just under

hello! Can to couldn’t. Canny to 58 cannonball. Come on

off to function as an adject

ive.

I blow feathers across a table at you. ...nevertheless, it’s not a beard, it is patchwork.

-ous adj suffix: full of: abounding in: having: possessing the qualities of say a few clouds. Oh, none. To keep the eyelids taped shut is a good way to preserve one’s own darkness, darling.

I’m instead of I have. 59 Pom-pomming ruthlessly, the trees. To what end

is a question mark orphaning a moment called November by

fluorescence. Attitude. Metaphorical structures. Thematic crayons.

You are chewing with your mouth open.

60 I am nature, Jackson Pollock said, put up or shut up. But who gives an f you see k what

Jackson Pollack says?

61 ArmandGarnetRuffo from The Thunderbird Poems, after the paintings of Norval Morrisseau

Life Scroll, n.d.

Where your dreams find you in the blue lake of your mind and vibrate to the surface like a speckled trout.

Where a long forgotten rock face turns into your face and vision points in the direction of youth, middle age, old age.

Where gnarled fingers slide with precision along a map of birch bark and belief and ritual hold hands.

Where there is no one but you and the echoes of ancestors you cry for in the halls of your loneliest night.

Where all creation rests on the back of the strongest and depends upon the grasp of the weakest, and all is related.

62 Where you learn the art of listening and the old words drip into the stone bowl of your deafness.

Where you learn the art of seeing and the old signs are owl eyes that stare into the forest of your ignorance.

Where you must learn how to love and be loved and admit that your journey too will soon come to an end. Ancestors Performing the Ritual of the Shaking Tent, c. 1958–61

You are standing outside the ceremony gazing upon three red-hooded members of the secret Midewewin Medicine Society in the midst of the mysterious and powerful Jeeskum, the shaking tent ceremony.

Of the two standing figures, one is drumming, the second is shaking a rattle, the third figure whose back is toward you is sitting, presumably praying. Centred in the background a wigwam stitched together from hide or bark. Staked to the ground.

The fourth figure you do not see. 63 The Conjurer is inside the tent. The blessed Shaman. The one who makes things tremble. The one who provides the questions. The one sanctioned by gift.

Bound hand and foot, he first calls in Mikkinuk, Turtle, to interpret for all the other spirits. Mikkinuk is no ordinary turtle, but a spirit embodied in the shell of turtle.

After the appropriate ritual, the prayers and songs of praise and humility, if the spirits approve, if the ceremony is strong enough, Mikkinuk will enter the tent and blow away the Shaman’s bindings. Then whoever or whatever may be...follows, the spirits exuding such power that each response they give lifts the tent off the ground, wants to tear it from its mooring. A cacophony of voices slamming into it, all the force of a storm. In another time and place, it is Morrisseau inside the tent.

64 Self-Portrait. Devoured by His Own Passion, 1974

His snake passion eats him alive. Rubbing alcohol. Wine & whisky. Gallons of it. A goddamn boatload. Guzzling sloppy. Fat tongue bloated like a bloodsucker. Marijuana. Cocaine. Tranquilizers. Mind dulled like a black eye. Teeth sharpened like a blade at the neck of another lover: female, male, between. It makes no difference.

Morrisseau does his damnedest to turn off guilt and become the consummate trickster, Nanabush wrestling the world of the senses, 67 but his penis grows like a vine writhing into a bouquet of serpents (the very serpent that tricked mankind) threatening to strangle him. And he is left with a Christian confession, a portrait of his own eternal internal struggle. The Gift, 1975

This one he never completes.

Maybe his hand goes numb. Maybe it cramps each time he tries. Maybe it turns into a fist. Maybe it grabs a bottle.

The hopelessness is just too much.

He closes his eyes and wakes up. All around the dead and dying. Faces consumed by scab and pus. Fire turned to smoke and ash.

He tries to translate his vision to canvas.

68 Manages a pockmarked priest, and a pockmarked father embraced by a benevolent handshake. The exchange red as Christ-mass, red as plague. A pockmarked boy stares at a crucifix. Even the next generation is not spared. They are all infected by religion.

Little wonder why. GillianWigmore

when we go to spain

and the chk chk sprinklers wake us dropping water like rain on the tent fly calling us out to shuck off our husks and fly and the dry hours of driving are ahead of us imagined as yet, we will drink our coffee and eat our bread

like arizona it beckons hot and windy and I can’t concentrate for all the pining after cacti and guava juice, hot little shots of coffee in the morning—I’m coughing up winter like a bad cold. remember? there were gales, dry skin cracked, glazed skies over the frozen earth

like antigua, argentina, like ibiza, unlike here when we rise, in spain, to the sweet, sere morning 70 we’ll sigh and be still for once. let me cry a little— hot coffee in the hot morning, the water drops like little bomb blasts in the dust on the hilltops luckless, vinced darker outline of the mountains dark blue of the sky minus the stars out this left window on the universe

—bp nichol, continental trance we aren’t the sum of the length of time it took to get here, nor the wail of train hauling track down east and away, we aren’t and weren’t we got here and it hurt, there was sunset, the darker outline of the mountains me and you the sky dark blue if this life is a journey we are worn raggedy, blaspheming non-stop vigour lost, laces fucked in knots, we tried and tried and tried, we waited luckless, vinced after being invincible, when once the sky was ours now this: night minus all stars 71 we are sweating, breathless, the air travelling in and down down down to all our necessary organs and once I loved you— all this and us stopping at mcbride station in the perfect V, the direct cunt of the valley, I wanted to be your vital statistics, your emergency services, I wish we mattered there are tracks and wilderness and nothing else left out this window on the universe RachelMarston

A Feeling of Home

Your child tells his therapist that he has planned your death. That he stands in your room at night and watches you sleep. That the missing skewer, butcher’s knife, scissors that you thought you had lost track of were all hidden in his room while he waited for the right time. Your son is 7. He has wide blue eyes and dark hair still cut in the loose shape of a bowl that covers the tops of his ears. His face, his hands, the mole over his upper lip: none of these things signal danger, but there it is. She, the therapist, looks at you and then at your husband and she asks you if this is the first time this has happened. This being your son holding his brother’s hand over an open flame. This being a plastic bag tied over the cat’s head and you finding him, the cat, just in time in the morning and then finding him a new home. The answer is no, this is not the first time. This is your life and not a horror movie or a novel. You reach for your husband’s hand and he lets you take it, but only because the therapist is watching. His hand sits limp in yours. His skin is damp. 73 You remember his hands on your hands, your face, your ribs those first times he touched you: calloused, warm and dry. After a minute, maybe more, you just release it and he breathes in quickly, a small intake of air. His hand swings in the air between you. The therapist opens her book, suggests the same time two days from now for the next appointment. You say, ‘Yes.’ Your husband says nothing. You leave her office and she leads you to the office next door where your son is playing by himself on the carpet, pushing a train along a vertical stripe, making the sound of the whistle blowing, the sound of the wheels on the tracks. This is your seven-year-old, the one who as a baby held onto the ends of your fingers and sucked with his little gums. He slept through the night at eight weeks old, his tiny fist grasping the tail of the toy dog your sister-in-law bought him. The smell of his baby breath was the first time you had ever known what it really meant to be home. You would sit in his room and watch him sleep in his crib and then wonder where the day had gone. This is the boy who, when meeting his baby brother, touched his cheek softly and then pushed his finger into the baby’s eye. You had expected some jealousy. Your husband told him, ‘No, no, touch him softly,’ showing him how to run his hand gently over Ben’s cheeks, his small fingers. You and your husband thought it would just take time to adjust. Then he pushed his younger brother off the couch and off his bed and out of his crib, once and again, and the third time you moved them to separate rooms.

On Tuesday, Ben steps into your room and asks if he can play outside. Ben is polite and quiet and he rarely misbehaves. You say, ‘Yes,’ and wave him out the door. You say, ‘If you go in the front yard, stay where I can see you from the window.’ He nods and runs for the door, his legs thinning out like the rest of him, his small torso still shaped like a jellybean. His brother, Derek, is all legs and elbows and angles now. Derek who sits quietly in his room, doing what, you are not sure. You could walk by his door and check on him. You could ask him what he wants for lunch. You could watch him watch his brother running in the front yard. You should have told Ben to play in the back so his brother couldn’t see him from the window. You don’t want to give Derek any 74 reasons for resentment, but you don’t want Ben to restrict his life more than he already does. Your two boys. You finish making the bed and you go to the kitchen to fix them tuna sandwiches.

The night you found your son in the kitchen with the cheese grater to his brother’s hand, you installed the door locks. His bedroom now locks from the outside. No escape if fire, no bathroom if a need to pee. After a time, you upgraded. Installed a glass door just outside his regular bedroom door so his room still had some light, still felt open to the house, but was locked and secure. He could close the inside door if he wanted, a small bit of privacy. Still, his small room is almost a cell, with his locked door and bars on his window. You had bars put on all the windows of the house to not call attention to his little jail.

Your husband asks, ‘What are we going to do?’ and you know that he means, Where are we going to send him, and when? You’ve called treatment facilities and child violence programs and spoke to your pediatrician. You will talk to them all again and again because you believe things will change, can change, must change. You believe that sending away your son cannot be the only option (who sends away their seven-year-old son?). Your husband asks you this question one week and the next and again, until he no longer asks it, and there is simply quiet between you in the bed at night.

Friday night, your husband brings home two pizzas from your sons’ favourite place. Ben likes the plain cheese; Derek won’t eat pizza without pepperoni. Neither boy will touch the pizza if there is a trace of anything else, like mushrooms or green peppers or even tomato that’s not part of the sauce. You all like pizza New York style, the thinner the crust the better. Your husband sets the pizza on the living-room table and opens up the boxes. He calls for the boys and they come running. Ben was in his room and you were sitting with Derek at the dining-room table working on his homework. The boys pull their slices from different boxes and hold them over paper plates. The boys are so much alike in their gestures. The way they hold their bodies, the way they move. And, at almost the same moment, they look up at you and give you their father’s lopsided smile. Your husband brings two beers from the fridge. One for him and one for you. Then he asks, ‘What movie should we watch?’ and holds up three DVDs for the boys to choose from. The boys argue a little, but just regular arguing. ‘No, I don’t want to watch that one. We 75 watched that last week,’ and back and forth until the negotiation is settled and there you are, on the couch, a nuclear family eating pizza and watching a movie on a Friday night. Your husband rests his hand on your shoulder. Ben sits on his other side and Derek sits between you. He snuggles into your side and your husband brushes his hand against your cheek and you wish it could be like this always.

When you were 7 did you dream of killing your parents? Did you picture the knife, the way you would cut into their flesh? The way the knife would sound on their skin? Did you know where you would put the bodies, where you would go with your small, packed suitcase? Did you plan to travel light or travel in style?

At school, the teacher says there is no problem. Your son is a model student. Shares his toys, his crayons, rarely speaks out of turn. The other children love him. He finishes his work, then helps the other students. He is never violent on the playground. She waits for you to tell her something more. As she describes this kind and thoughtful child, there is a question in her voice. She waits for you to say something, anything. You smile and nod, all agreement. You see him through the window. He is lying on the grass with a friend and he is laughing. He smiles, his mouth open wide, his head moving from side to side with his laughing. You do not tell her what you know. You thank her and you shake her hand. And when you walk out of the classroom door to the playground, your son runs to you and puts his hand in yours.

You wonder if you are crazy. You ask your husband, ‘Am I crazy?’ He says, ‘No.’ Then he goes to work and stays at work. He shrugs away from your touch in the kitchen, on the couch, in the bed, as if it is simply your genetics that have made this son, this strange beast in your home. A demon in a boy’s body. A boy who used to whisper in your ear at night, ‘I love you, Mommy.’

Each night, Ben sleeps with his arms around a brown toy bunny and is just learning to wake and use the bathroom when he needs to pee rather than peeing in the bed. Ben used to giggle and laugh and try to tackle his older brother. He used to follow his older brother around, playing with his toys, walking like he walked. Now, when Derek is in the room, Ben doesn’t say a thing and 76 doesn’t make a sound, but he doesn’t leave and he doesn’t turn his back. He wants to know where his brother is and what his brother is doing and what his brother might have in his hand. It could be a knife, a piece of broken glass, the carrot peeler. It could be something that neither you nor your husband ever thought could be used as a weapon. The wire for the Nintendo controller, a penny, his favourite stuffed animal. Now you know better: you and your husband and your other son. Everything can be a weapon. Everything. You wouldn’t have thought you would have to look at every object in every room everywhere you go as a potential hazard, as something he could wield against you or your husband or your younger son. But this is now the world in which you live. You count the crayons in the art box. You look for anything sharp and take it away. You don’t dress Derek in clothes with zippers because he once rubbed the zipper of his hoodie against the same spot on Ben’s arm over and over until the skin broke and Ben’s arm bled.

You used to work as a pediatric nurse on the oncology unit. When you had your first son, you took three months off and then went back for two shifts a week. Most were in the late afternoon, so your husband was home and could watch Derek. After Ben was born, the plan was the same. A slow return to work with more shifts as the boys got older. Preschool two days a week at age 2. Three days at age 3. Time set aside for each of the boys so they each had time alone with you or your husband. By the time Ben was in preschool three days a week, Derek would be in kindergarten. You could pick up more shifts and still have one of you home with the boys. You would have a sitter for Friday or Saturday night, so you could go on a date. And once in a while, your mother or your husband’s mother would come for the weekend to watch the boys, so the two of you could get away together. This was the plan you had mapped out, you and your husband, the plan for a happy, well-adjusted life.

Sometimes your husband is yelling. He is yelling at you and at the boys, but the one boy is in his room and the other son is in the yard. He says, ‘You are so irresponsible.’ He says, ‘Why do I even bother coming home if this is what I come home to?’ He says, ‘I can’t trust you to do anything.’ There was a time when you couldn’t have imagined this happening, you and your husband yelling at each other across the bedroom, a time when even your most heated arguments still resulted (at most 77 a day later) with the two of you tangled in the sheets. Now you are yelling back. You call him absent, cold, unfeeling. You yell that he is just like his father, a man who is only happy, only available, when everything fits his perfect picture of how a family should be. You know this isn’t helping, this yelling. He knows too, but both of you cannot help it. Sometimes the yelling feels better than the silence.

Sometimes your husband is cold and silent, like a ghost in your house and in your bed. He walks softly, open doors softly, even chops softly when he is cutting onions and cilantro for carne asada. You can put your hand on his skin, on his firm, warm flesh, and he doesn’t even move. He is there, but he isn’t. Though he has asked ‘What are we going to do?’ neither of you is really ready to talk about it. It’s as if, sometimes, you are both waiting for this to be over. As if none of it ever happened. As if all the locks and the bars and the precautions are ridiculous and you will wake up one morning and Derek and Ben will be eating cereal together at the counter and will get on their bikes and ride to the corner and back and eat Popsicles on the front porch. That the world will soon be like the one you imagined together in your first apartment on the couch salvaged from the street, planning the future. ■ The therapist tells you she is not certain of your son’s future. She tells you that he may ‘grow out of it’ and she holds her fingers up in the air as she says the words. Your husband asks, ‘What does that mean?’ She moves past his question, waves it away with a hand in front of her face. ‘He could end up being equipped to live a normal life, without supervision, able to hold a job, even get married.’ In the pause between her sentences, you and your husband hear, But that is unlikely. The therapist tells you some of the things your son has done. Spiders burned leg by leg. Birds with wings pulled off their bodies. Luring the neighbour’s dog over with a piece of bacon and then beat- ing it with a stick. ‘So far, other than the incidents with his brother and the two of you, he has not harmed another person.’ This time you lean back in your chair and you don’t reach for your husband’s hand. You think: Not that he has told you. You think: Not yet.

You can’t leave the boys alone in a room together. You can’t hire a babysitter because how do you tell her that your son might fashion, like a little prison shiv maker, something sharp out of a pen, a GI 78 Joe, a stick from the yard? Or that the keys to the locked drawers in the kitchen are here or there (whisper and tell the sitter not to repeat it out loud and that you change the keys’ location every week, then every two days), that the sitter just shouldn’t do anything, cook anything, eat anything that might require getting out one of the knives, that she can’t even leave the boys watching TV to go to the bathroom. You are afraid to go to the grocery store, to weed the garden beds, to take a shower. You think that you have to watch them, be with them, your boys, all the time. Even when your older son is locked in his sunny room, you are afraid of what might happen.

You are surprised by the shapes a prison can take: a craftsman-style bungalow, your body, your son’s body, his room, your marriage, your family. Something inhabited daily, unthinkingly, until the wrench in your gut, that old feeling of resistance. You think: It doesn’t have to be like this. But you can see nothing else in your future.

One day you are in the kitchen and you are making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. One boy likes grape jelly. The other likes strawberry. You keep both flavours in the fridge because you like to give them what they want when you can. The day is sunny and clear and you might let Ben play next door at the neighbour’s. Derek was sitting on his bed with a stack of library books when you last walked past his door. You spread the peanut butter on one piece of bread, the jelly on the other. The sun casts shadows from the aspen tree leaves on the counter: a hand, a dragon, the moon. Ben will be there any moment, asking for his sandwich, asking for more barbeque chips. Yes, he has to eat all the carrots. Yes, he will get a cookie for dessert if he eats his whole lunch. Derek will not ask for anything other than what is on his plate, after you let him out of his room, after he has finished drinking all of his milk. He will want a cookie, but will not say so. He will just eat quietly. Ben will sit at the opposite end of the table and you will sit at a chair in the middle asking them questions about their day. You will think about taking Derek on a walk with you. You turn to call for Ben and there is Derek and he has the bread knife in his hand. The knife is big and his hand is little. You reach for his hand and he cuts your arm with the knife; the serrations catch your skin. Your arm bleeds and you step toward him, faster this time, and grab his arm. There is nothing in his face, nothing. No anger, no tears, just a boy, a hand, a knife. You pull him in front of you, his back to your chest and he resists, 79 his body made heavy and limp, a way to slide out of your arms. You twist his hand, you feel his soft skin beneath yours, you feel his skin bruising. He pushes back against you. He doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t drop the knife. Your arm bleeds. He pushes and pushes and twists his hand under your hand, his skin rubbing raw. You cannot let him go. You hear Ben enter the kitchen and you do not turn. You say, ‘Ben, go to your room.’ Derek’s breathing is heavy in your ears, in your arms. He struggles, the knife turns in his hand and presses into his skin. Still he does not let go. You try to turn the blade away, to turn his wrist. You tighten your hold on his arm and you twist his arm. You are stronger than him. You don’t want to hurt him, but there is no other way. The blade scrapes across his skin and you twist his hand further, a terrible game of Indian burns, his wrist at an unbearable angle, trying to move the blade away from you both. You hold him hard and fast to your body. He kicks his feet behind him, kicks you in the shin, in the groin, trying to push away from you, to turn the knife toward you. You hold him tighter. You hear him gasp for air. He will not let loose the knife. The strain in your shoulders, in your hands, you don’t know how much longer you can hold him, your son, this twisting, writhing beast. You can not let him go. You pound his arm against the counter, the cupboards, the wall. He makes no sound, but the sound of this skin and bone against plaster, tile, wood. His shoulder will dislocate. You will break his wrist. He has the knife against your skin once more. You heave him against the wall. His blood is on your arms, on the counter, on the floor. His blood and your blood. He is crying, but your son makes no other noise, no sounds of struggle. Nothing like his mewling baby cries, nothing like his tearful sobs. The kitchen is full of your breathing. One last thud, flesh and bone and tile, and the knife falls from his hand. You kick it away and you hold him close to you. His body goes weak in your arms. You embrace him, your son, your beautiful boy, wrap yourself around him. Your husband will come home and find you together on the kitchen floor. He will try to pull Derek from your arms. He will panic and yell and cry. He will say, ‘This is all your fault.’ He will take Ben to 80 his mother’s. He will threaten to leave you. He will call 9-1-1. There will be firemen and police and counselors and lawyers and evaluations and hospitals and brochures and endless discussions of who is responsible and what to do. There will be more counselling, individually and as a family, or as a family without Derek. There will be weeks and months and years of visiting him in sterile, guarded rooms, where at first you cannot even sit next to him, but must sit on the other side of a table. Then maybe, months later, visits with Derek sitting with you on the same couch, an orderly stationed just outside the door, and the abbreviated view of carefully manicured gardens seen from his window. A place where, after years, he learns to write poetry, where he begins to seem happy, adjusted, normal, but he can not ever come home. This future stretches out before you. You do not let him go. You hold him to you, your son, in your lap, his arms now around you. He clings to you. He cries softly. You whisper his name. He rests his head on your chest. His hair smells of cherries. ScottRandall

And to Say Hello

Once in the playground, while Sam was asleep in his stroller, I watched a little girl as she collected and repeatedly piled a dozen branches and twigs. It was exactly a dozen. I remember because she kept counting the things over and over again. ‘One, two, three, four.’ Under the steps of the toddler slide. On the bottom stair leading up to the climber. Beneath the monkey bars. ‘Five, six, seven.’ She picked the sticks up one at a time, making pile after pile—patient and slow until she got to eight. ‘Ehnintenleven, 12.’ The girl’s mother was seated two park benches down, flipping through a parenting magazine, but we made brief eye contact, grinning when her daughter rushed through the end of her count. It was cute. The girl must have been close to 3, I guessed. ‘What is it with kids and sticks?’ I asked across the playground. We were the only mothers in the park, and it would have felt rude not to acknowledge our shared moment. The woman 81 just nodded and grinned again, though. Pretty sure she didn’t hear me. With an inward shrug, I turned to watch Sam sleep, an addictive habit I’d been trying and failing to shake. He would have been 13 or 14 months at that point. In the background, I heard the girl continue. ‘First stick, second stick, third stick.’ Ordinal numbers. Advanced for her age. ‘Fourth stick, stick five, stick six, ehninten sticks.’ At some point, she started piling the sticks next to her mother on the bench seat. With all 12 arranged to her satisfaction, the girl hopped up, careful not to disturb all that organization, and set about digging and peeling back the bark from each stick. Mostly small wood flecks, but she got off a few good strips now and then. Throughout, she muttered to herself, narrating her own actions. ‘Stick skin peels away, away, away.’ It was wonderful, and I couldn’t help imagining a time when Sam would communicate so very much. He was a calm infant—settled and napped easily, and that was lucky for me, I know—but I looked forward to more back and forth. ‘Look at how easy the skin comes off, Mommy.’ The stick in the girl’s hand looked to be birch. ‘Big pieces.’ She passed her mother a satisfying chunk of grey-white bark. ‘You did a good job. Yes.’ The woman flipped a magazine page. ‘Like a old scab,’ the girl said. A simile. Maybe she was 4. The woman folded the corner of a page and passed her daughter a toque. ‘Ready for home?’ ‘I’m peeling skin from the stick.’ ‘It’s bark.’ ‘Dogs bark.’ ‘Yes, dogs bark.’ Distracted, the woman hunted in her purse. Keys, probably. ‘And the skin of a tree is called bark.’ ‘What?’ ‘The skin on a stick or a tree is called bark, dear. Different from a doggie barking.’ She was still hunting for her keys—the damn things pick the worst time to disappear down a purse. ‘Sticks don’t bark.’ ‘No. Sticks don’t bark. Sticks have bark.’ The woman stood from the bench and waved her daughter to follow. ‘A dog’s not a stick.’ ‘No, it’s not. Let’s get down from the bench.’ Her voice was growing impatient. ‘Dogs like sticks.’ 82 ‘I asked you to get down from the bench.’ This would deteriorate quickly, I thought. ‘Dogs bark.’ ‘Now I am asking you again to get down from the bench.’ ‘Are you mad?’ ‘We can talk about it when you get down from the bench.’ ‘Okay.’ The girl slid off. ‘We have to go to the car.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Don’t you like coming to the park?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to come to the park again?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘We have to learn to listen better.’ ‘Okay.’ After they were gone, the disgusted look on the woman’s face stayed with me. She’d kept pointing at the ground to order the girl down, and I made a mental note to tell Fergus about the girl’s confusion later. I was still doing such things at that point.

We were in bed when I told him, and it led to sharing childhood memories. Fergus once believed rack and pinion steering was one word: rackopinion. I once thought all intents and purposes was all intensive purposes. ‘When I was real little, I used to sing, Cucumber, chicken of the egg, instead of Which came first, chicken or the egg?’ ‘Sesame Street,’ he said. ‘I remember that song.’ ‘I remember feeling humiliated when I realized my mistake.’ ‘Humiliated?’ ‘Yet another childhood peril.’ ‘Yes.’ I could feel him nod next to me. ‘Stick, dog, bark.’

At seven months old, Sam began making a sound that was probably Mommy, and a few weeks after, there was Dad. The pronunciation wasn’t always coherent and these words often seemed unconnected to either Fergus or me. Nonetheless, first words. In the next month, no new words came. In Year One said benchmarks for speech vary from child to child; the pediatrician said Sam was in the 80th per- centile for height and weight, and Fergus said not to worry. I tried not to. I was a fearful parent, I knew that. My parents had been fearful parents and I had become a fearful parent. The root cause was no mystery—I had a brother who died of a brain tumour when he was 5 and I was 6. One day after school, his eyes went odd, they took him to 83 the doctor, and that was that. As the cancer grew and created pressure against his brain, he was cross-eyed all the time. There’s a word for it, but I can’t think of it now. Anyway, those months in pediatric oncology left a mark. My parents grew fearful and they passed that on to me. So fine. Fergus indulged me, reassured me that all parents check their infants’ breathing periodically throughout the night, reassured me that all parents dispose of baby food when the vacuum lids fail to pop loudly enough, reassured me that all parents were concerned about the danger of vertical blind cords. Of course it was normal to worry about speech development, he said. Mommy and Dad started to appear more consistently, and then, at 11 months, there was duck. A bit of a non-sequitur, but news nonetheless. Sometimes Grover stuffy was duck, sometimes the highchair was duck, and sometimes his bath duck was duck. But accuracy hardly mattered. There was progress. And then there wasn’t. Shortly after his first birthday party, Sam stopped using Dad quite as often. Then Mommy became a rarity. More and more, he reverted to his expressive jabbering or he stared and then turned away as if in introspection. Duck dropped off altogether. ■ In Year One said not to worry, but an extra trip to the pediatrician might reduce my anxieties. The pediatrician said there was no need to overreact, but an appointment with a hearing specialist might ease my concerns. Fergus said not to worry, but a few speech development books from the library might relieve my mind. ‘She stressed that the important thing was not to worry,’ Fergus said. We were in bed, going over our appointment with the hearing specialist. ‘Of course.’ There was nothing wrong with Sam’s hearing and, as far as the specialist could tell, no physical reason he’d stopped speaking. ‘This is good news.’ ‘Good news,’ said Fergus. ‘No coordination problems, no dexterity problems, no mobility problems. No cause for worry.’ ‘Yes. And early intervention will help.’ Sam was referred to a speech therapist for assessment. ‘And he isn’t even a year and a half yet,’ Fergus said. ‘Another 10 days.’ ‘Really?’ ‘The 15th is 18 months.’ ‘If a problem exists, early intervention is the best course of action.’ Fergus was parroting the hearing specialist. 84 ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘We don’t know if there even is a problem at this point.’ ‘Eighteen months?’ Fergus shook his head in amazement—like every parent before him. We were silent for a moment, and I wondered if I’d done the right thing taking an extended leave from work. Was I depriving Sam of needed socialization? ‘Daycare?’ I asked. ‘Daycare might or might not have affected his development.’ That was the answer I wanted, but it wasn’t reassuring. ‘I’m going to the library tomorrow,’ I said.

At the hospital, moments after Sam was born and placed in my arms, one of the nurses lifted him away to be weighed and measured. He came back to my arms clean and expertly swaddled, a miniature plastic hospital band on his wrist. Baby boy Simons. Mother: Cheryl Wright-Simons. 7.6. 11-02 13:20. It was so he didn’t get mixed up with someone else’s son, I realized. The bracelet was attached as a precaution—probably part of some standardized hospital procedure. A safeguard. But it did not make me feel safe. That little bracelet could be snipped right off, so what kind of protection was that? Could it stop some barren mad- woman intent on snatching a child? Would it stop some anarchist nurse from switching out identification bands?

In the library, I learned that nouns should have been the beginning: Mommy, Dad, bottle, diaper, duck, Sam. Then verbs, often free floating: hug, smile, eat, smell, splash, laugh. The next step was attaching a noun to a verb: Mommy hugs, duck swim, diaper smell. Subject and predicate agreement hardly mattered. From there, adjectives would come like adornments: happy Mommy hugs, yellow duck swim. And then things get complicated pretty quickly. Subject pronouns before object pronouns. First-person first, third-person second. He is yellow duck. Sometimes confused. Him is a yellow duck. Conjunctions may be limited to and and but, but so could not be excluded. Duck swim and splashes. Tense would be limited to present, and present progressive, leading to simple past. Errors in irregular verbs were a positive indicator as they demonstrated an understanding of tense. Duck swimmed. How would Sam get all this? I knew I was being irrational, but delayed speech meant delayed reading, delayed writing, damaged social skills, poor work habits. Unhappiness. Dogs bark. Sticks have bark. 85 After 30 minutes on the play-room floor, speech therapist Susan came to no concrete conclusions. Sam was delayed. But he main- tained good eye contact. Sam was not initiating communication. But he did respond through body language. Sam was not using the vo- cabulary he should have. But his sounds were clear. Sam, it turned out, was a good candidate for the First Words program, which, in our case, would be Toddler Talk, a weekly afternoon class for parents and children, and Two to Talk, a weekly night class for parents. Thanks to speech therapist Susan, we got into the classes that same week. ‘It’s set up like playgroup,’ I told Fergus after our first Toddler Talk, ‘but smaller and focused.’ ‘Focused on dinosaurs?’ ‘The dinosaurs were just for this week,’ I said. ‘Like a theme.’ ‘Sorry.’ ‘Are you listening?’ ‘Sorry. Tired. I’m listening.’ He’d had a late flight in from Calgary that night, and I was in bed reading the Two to Talk manual when he came in. ‘The focus is on speech development.’ ‘Of course. Sorry. How many kids?’ ‘Eight. Two twins. All boys between 18 and 36 months.’ ‘Man.’ ‘It was noisy.’ I’d read that delayed children were more prone to tan- trums but somewhere in my head, I must have expected a room full of quiet, inward Sams. This was not the case. The twins were the oldest in the group and looked like they might be downright vicious. ‘The play stations are set up to trick the kids into talking.’ At one table, there had been plastic dinosaurs of different sizes and colours. A big blue brachiosaurus. Little red raptors. Big green pterodactyls. Little orange triceratops. ‘You offer choice to force the child to speak.’ ‘I get it.’ ‘Blue or red? Big or small? That sort of thing.’ ‘Did it work?’ ‘Not on Sam, no. I’m supposed to listen for sounds that are similar.’ ‘Makes sense.’ Fergus was nodding as he undressed for bed. ‘What other themes will there be?’ I shrugged. ‘Guys and Dolls?’ He grinned as he got into bed. ‘The Mikado.’ ‘Black-tie formal.’ He slid under the covers on his side. ‘Prom Night Under the Sea.’ ‘The Sadie Hawkins hoedown.’ 86 ‘Your worries?’ He snuggled in against me. ‘All in check.’ ‘Good then.’ ‘Do you mind if I keep the light on to read?’ I asked. I could see the disappointment in his face, but I didn’t acknowledge it. ‘No, that’s all right. I’ll face the other way.’ And with that, he went to sleep.

After my brother’s death, my parents were fearful in any number of ways. Any older child could be a bully, any dog larger than a terrier could be a threat, any headache warranted a visit to the doctor. What seemed to bring out their fear the most, though, was a car. From the back seat of our Oldsmobile, I more than once heard them repeat their disappointment in other drivers. The automobile brought out the very worst in human nature, they claimed. The most ugly and basic selfishness, carelessness, and aggression. Get someone behind a steering wheel and that’s all it took to see what is inside all of us. They never said this with anger, only a sad weariness. So it makes sense that some of my worst fears had to do with cars. Pushing the stroller to the playground, I glared at any car driving even close to our street’s 40 km/hr limit. Drivers turning right at an intersection were a particular hazard because they tended to look for oncoming cars to their left, not vulnerable pedestrians to the right. In the car, the Baby on Board sign most often discouraged tailgaters, but other times it encouraged impatient drivers to speed up and swipe past. Fortunately, none of these dangers ever did lead to an accident, but I still imagined the worst. The speeding car jumps the curb and runs down the sidewalk out of control. The right-turning car clips the stroller and sends it crashing. The passing car cuts back too soon and we’re forced into the ditch. From there, I would think of the aftermath: hours in a hospital waiting room; long distance calls to relatives to pass on the news; the selection of an undersized cof- fin. Morbid, indulgent imaginings, I know, but that’s the thing about irrational thought: it’s irrational. What I could not imagine was a parent continuing on after such a loss. My parents did, but I could not conceive how they did it.

So, no. I was not able to keep my worries in check. But I was able to keep them to myself. Fergus was a good husband for many reasons. The security and the money: people say it’s not important and blah blah blah, but screw that. After his move from a management to executive pay scale, whether I worked full-time, part-time, occasional, temporary or not at all wasn’t an issue. I could focus on Sam. And Fergus was 87 normalcy inside and out. Laid back by nature, he knew when to stay awake and listen, when to shut up and spoon, and when to roll away and go to sleep. As a father, he found a workable middle ground. He wasn’t one of the wuss house-husbands I sometimes saw at playgroup—four days of stubble in a Reading Rainbow T-shirt, sipping on a juice box—but he also wasn’t one of those cold descendants of paternal distance just waiting to pass on their Oedipal nonsense. His easy confidence was a good counterweight to my fearful anxiety. So, fine. I should have appreciated my good husband more.

‘You’re doing well with him.’ ‘Thanks.’ Sam and I were at the water table when speech therapist Susan came over to observe. ‘Are you counting your wait times?’ I nodded. This was one of the tips from the Two to Talk manual. After a question, the parent was to hold an expectant expression, wait patiently, and speak only after a mental count to 10. I’d prac- tised my expectant look in the mirror. ‘Good, good.’ ‘He still hasn’t said much.’ ‘We’re obviously having fun.’ She was talking to Sam and me now. ‘And fun is where we start.’ It was creepy how she slipped into plural. All three of the speech therapists at Toddler Talk did the same thing. ‘Booooat,’ she said. ‘Buh-Buh-Boat.’ She lifted a tug boat out of the water table, and Sam turned toward her. ‘Buh-Buh-Boooat.’ He glanced down at the battleship in his own hands. ‘What’s that?’ speech therapist Susan asked. One stick, two sticks, three sticks. Sam looked back up at her. Four sticks, five sticks, six sticks, seven sticks. God love her, she held his eye contact. Ehninten. A 10-second wait could feel like ages. ‘Is that a boat?’ she asked. Sam stared at her again. I didn’t want to watch yet another gruel- ing 10 count, so I scanned over the other parents to check their progress. One mother had two airplane puppets on her hands, trying to initiate talk with the dump truck puppet on her son’s hand. Another mother described Matchbox after Matchbox and Hot Wheel after Hot Wheel as she placed them in a row, trying to get her son to take a turn. ‘Yes, it’s a buh-buh-boat,’ Susan finally said. Sam held out his hand for the tug boat. 88 ‘Here you go.’ ‘Thank you,’ I said with an overly tender tone—my unintentional proxy-Sam voice. ‘Have you been reviewing the class materials with your husband?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Good. And you’re both using the techniques at home?’ ‘We’re trying everything we can,’ I said. The we wasn’t entirely truthful. She turned back to watch Sam. ‘He is a quiet one, isn’t he? Looks so pensive.’ This was Fergus’s optimistic take. Sam wasn’t delayed, he was taking time to consider his words. ‘I’ve been using the sign language along with my prompts,’ I said. ‘I narrate what I’m doing constantly. I keep the CBC on in the background.’ I felt like a child trying to impress a favourite teacher. ‘Socialization?’ ‘We go to the Cityview playgroup. Twice a week now.’ ‘Good.’ She glanced at her watch and turned to address the room. ‘Hands on top, that means stop.’

‘What does that mean?’ ‘A daycare-type rhyme. All the people at Toddler Talk use it.’ Fergus was helping set the table for a late dinner while I filled him in on our day. ‘Watch.’ I turned to Sam and repeated the rhyme in a singsong voice, ‘Hands on top, that means stop.’ In his highchair, Sam released the infant crayons from his fists and placed his hands on his head. ‘Look at that,’ Fergus said. ‘This works on a room full of noisy boys?’ ‘Like mass hypnosis,’ I said. It felt somehow wrong to speak about the class in front of Sam this way. Like I might jinx it. Lately though, I’d found that I was spending all our time in bed telling Fergus these things, and I sensed he resented it. ‘Downright Manchurian Candidate.’ Fergus put the crayons back in Sam’s hands. ‘Here you go, buddy.’ ‘It signals the end of activities and the beginning of circle time. All the kids and parents march next door where pillows are set up over mats. Once we’re standing in a circle, one of the therapists says, “Crisscross, apple sauce.”’ ‘Another useful rhyme.’ ‘This week’s theme was transportation: planes, trains and auto- mobiles. And boats.’ 89 ‘Still no Sadie Hawkins hoedown, then?’ ‘Not yet.’ ‘Shame.’ ‘Once we’re all seated, everyone sings, We’re sitting down for story, for story, for story. We’re sitting down for story and to say hello.’ Sam looked up from his colouring book with a look of recognition. ‘And hello to Sam,’ I sang, ‘and hello to Michael, and hello to Jacob. We’re sitting down for story and to say hello. That’s Sam’s favourite part.’ Sam grinned in agreement and dove back into colouring. ‘Sounds like you like it too,’ Fergus said. ‘Maybe.’ I shrugged. ‘If you want to go, I’ll sit out a week.’ He shrugged. ‘Susan said it’s beneficial.’ ‘Yeah, but...’ Fergus shrugged again. ‘It’s more your thing at this point.’

The following week’s theme was Aquatic Life: plastic fish, colouring sheets of octopi, crustacean costumes. Not quite Prom Night Under the Sea, but pretty close, and I made a note to mention it to Fergus later. Sam and I were again at the water table, which had become his favourite play station. Inside the water were plastic bath toys and I was trying to draw a question out of him. ‘Pour?’ The whale scoop was in my hand, and I was holding my expectant look. ‘Pour?’ Sam was holding a crab bucket and waiting. ‘Pour?’ He looked like he’d wait indefinitely, and after a while I felt a bit cruel. You were supposed to find a repeated activity that the child wanted and withhold it as a prompt. ‘Do you want Mommy to pour?’ Sam nodded. That was a mistake. The Two to Talk manual said to avoid yes or no questions. ‘Mommy blew it,’ I said. I emptied the whale in defeat. Across from the water table, the mother with twins was having an even worse time of it. She was crouched on a throw pillow next to her sons in a carpeted area between the loveseat and a couple of armchairs. The furniture created a separate play station where the speech therapists always set up the container exercise. ‘Open? Open?’ the woman said. The twins each had transparent clamshells in their hands and in- 90 side the clamshells there were plastic mermaids. One twin grunted and banged the thing against the carpet, but the other one just stared at it. ‘Do you want me to open?’ the woman repeated. The container exercise worked by withholding help, but with an extra temptation inside the container. It seemed a bit cruel, too. ‘Open?’ One of the boys stood and yelled an angry noise that sounded like murhhe. Mother or mermaid? I don’t know. He heaved the clamshell and connected with her forehead, knocking her glasses to the carpet. Speech therapist Susan rushed over to help, soothing the angry son and checking that the mother wasn’t seriously injured and, like all the other mothers, I looked on in helpless concern. Sympathy, empathy and helpless concern—that was the entire range of emotion in Toddler Talk. The other son, I noticed, was still staring at the clamshell in his lap, as if his brother hadn’t just had a complete freakout. Hair had fallen over the quiet boy’s face and in trying to focus on the toy, he had gone cross-eyed. Strabismus—that’s the word.

Fergus was already back at the house when we returned. A meeting had been cancelled, he said, and he thought we could all spend the afternoon together. ‘Forgot you guys had the class.’ ‘Yeah.’ Sam toddled over to his father in a rush. ‘There’s a message from your dad on the phone.’ ‘Did he want anything?’ ‘Just to say hello. Have you told them?’ ‘No.’ Although my parents called once a week, I hadn’t said anything about Sam’s delay. ‘Want to colour, buddy?’ Fergus lifted Sam to his lap. The phone message was exactly what Fergus said: ‘Just called to say hello.’ It was the phrase my father always used when he called. The exact same message ever since I moved away for university and never moved back home. A meaningless phrase really, and I long ago understood that he used it to express all the parental worry for which language is inadequate. The way to survive the loss of a child, I understand now, is another child. I was how my parents went on.

Fergus never wanted more than one. The topic became a source of tension. But as time went on and Sam grew up, it was only one of many sources of tension. Booster seats, junior kindergartens, private schools, French immersion programs, summer camp, girlfriends, curfews. Any one of these topics could lead to days of icy quiet, and 91 they left a mark. Parenting books like In Year One never dealt with such problems. In the end, and to Fergus’s credit, he told me we’d simply grown apart. Another meaningless phrase, but kind. We didn’t quite make it to Sam’s 18th birthday, but almost. That’s probably to Fergus’s credit as well. We separated when Sam was in Grade 13, and the divorce was final when he was a sophomore at McGill. Computer engineering. Part of me had hoped he would go into linguistics or psychology, with an eye toward speech therapy. His first few years seemed so critical to me somehow that I suppose I expected they would have a lasting impact on Sam as well. But no. We had stayed with the First Words program until he was nearly 4. After Toddler Talk, the next group class was Preschool Pairs and then Chatterboxes, but there were also night classes in Phonetic Reading, Enunciation, Speech through Song, and a couple more I can no longer name. The breakthrough was near the end of Tod- dler Talk, and after that, whatever was delaying his development simply fell away and he progressed quickly. From two-word utter- ances to three-word sentences, he hardly seemed to pause and he was using coordinate and subordinate conjunctions. One day in Pre- school Pairs, Sam took no more than a glance at Susan’s clipboard and spotted his own name printed there. He pointed and exclaimed, ‘That’s Sam.’ He saw a word and connected it to language and to himself and made a sentence out of the connections. ‘I’m sure you appreciate how significant that is,’ Susan said at the time. I did. Such prereading skills are a good indicator of later success. Pretty soon he was pointing to words in his picture books and asking what this one was and that one was. Once he had his alphabet down, we played a game in which he’d hunt down key words. In the car, we would pick random words and he proudly named the first letter. ‘Tree, tree starts with t. Squirrel, squirrel starts with s. Mail- box, mailbox starts with m like Mommy.’ By the time he began junior kindergarten, he was ahead of the children in his class. But while I remember our time in First Words as significant, Sam seems to have no memory of it at all. So, fine. Computer engineering. In the years immediately following the divorce, I saw Fergus only twice: at Sam’s graduations. Later, though, when my mother passed, he left a sweet message on my machine. ‘Just to say hello,’ he said, which made me grin. After that, we called each other every couple of months to catch up. And, when my father died, Fergus felt comfortable enough to attend the funeral. The last time I saw him was at 92 Sam’s apartment. Sam and his girlfriend, Sarah, had us over for dinner along with her parents, and—no surprise—it was to announce their engagement. With everyone in a fine mood, and after four shared bottles of wine, we got to swapping stories from Sam and Sarah’s childhoods, and I was amazed at how much Fergus remembered. ‘The time I had heartburn and Sam got sunscreen from the medicine cabinet?’ ‘What was that thing he said when he was upset?’ ‘Naked poopoo, it’s not your birthday.’ ‘That’s right. Whenever he was mad at you, he strung together the worst words he knew. Naked poopoo, it’s not your birthday.’ Fergus asked me if I remembered the stick, the bark and the dog, and he hadn’t even been present that day at the park. My good husband. That’s fine.

On the day that farming was the theme at Toddler Talk, Sam and I had arrived to find the water table filled with cedar shavings. Suit- ably puzzled, he turned his head from the tub to me and then back to the tub. ‘What happened?’ I asked The look on his face was an adult’s bemusement. I had to hold back a laugh. ‘Where’d the water go?’ Without so much as a shrug, he accepted this new turn of events and put his hands in the pool of wood, retrieving a plastic cow and a pig as if he expected they’d be there all along. Kids adjust. The twins, I noticed, were now accompanied by both mother and father, the whole family sitting at the Play-Doh station, where a dozen farmyard animal moulds were scattered. The father didn’t seem to be paying much attention, but his presence did have an effect. Working together, the twins produced blue sheep after blue sheep, one brother rolling flat pancakes and the other brother stamping the mould into the dough. It was cooperation all right, but they were still silent. I thought to mention the man’s presence to Fergus later, but never did. ‘What do you have there?’ I asked Sam. He’d pulled out the bottom of his T-shirt, cradling a half dozen barnyard animals in the stretched cloth. ‘Moo cow, oink pig, baa sheep, cluck cluck chicken.’ Sam handed them to me one by one—expecting I don’t know what. The look on his face was all business, though, so I played along, lining the toys up on the floor in an orderly fashion. ‘Neigh horse, gobble gobble turkey.’ He bent back over the water table, his arms elbow-deep in wood chips and searched for more. 93 ‘Maybe we found them all? No more?’ I asked. I reached to join in the search for a rooster or goat or whatever and came up with a small plastic duck. Sam grinned. ‘Duck swimmed.’ ColinSnowsell

Mann from Mars

I wasn’t raised right, but I don’t think I was raised wrong—not com- pared to a lot of you around here. As far as I can see, there is just a whole truckload of wrongness in here, and it makes me sad, that’s no lie. I drum for a Christian metal band, and, no, I don’t think you’ve ever heard of us, but we rock to bring glory to the King and I just want to make sure you’re hearing me. Whatever I do, I give it all back to Him, he who made me. And I know there’s two laws, the man’s law that got me sitting here with pen and paper, and a higher one, and whenever the two don’t line up the way they should it’s not like it’s ever been much of a head scratch for me which one came written on stone from the Almighty and which one’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. If you’re ever down San Antonio way, look us up: Geth- semakneel. Best White Metal in Texas. You can find us on Myspace. We play second Thursday every month at the Mars Hill Christian Fellowship. But if you’re only in town on a weekend convention, I per- sonally invite you to come out to a Sunday service. It’s a bit more 94 low-key, but God hears the soul not the power chords and I tell you this: Any man who comes forward with an open heart will find God standing there halfway saying, What took you so long, son? Now that’s something. Outside the Kingdom isn’t no such thing as a real man, and it took a long time for Him to break me and all I can say is, are you humbled enough before the throne to do what’s right for all eternity, not what’s popular RIGHT NOW? I am, and that’s why I’m here. This isn’t a confession, because one thing: I have always taken responsibility for my actions. Any man plants both his feet solid in the Word stands for all time, so it’s not like I’m trying to get away with anything. Yes, I live in the world and my body would like to get away from here, but only because I miss Kathleen. No, this is not how I planned on spending our 20th anniversary together—I had the Mega Room booked at the W Hotel in Dallas. We honeymooned there, but not in the Mega Room. I wish I hadn’t thought of that because it doesn’t do no one any good to covet things they don’t got, and the Mega Room is ritz. I doubt any man alive has ever wanted a spa treatment as bad as I do right now. One thing I will say is that nothing cures you of temptation faster than knowing all of that’s out of reach—maybe not forever but for now anyway—for a good, long while. Shoot, it’s all perspective. This isn’t even the blink of an eye, once we join Him on the other side. Like I was starting to say, don’t let anyone tell you Christians don’t know how to do it up in style. Me and Kathleen know how to have a good time like nobody’s business, but wasn’t no W in His will and, like I told Kathleen, we have to accept that. When I turned over my life to Him, I said I’m yours, Lord, break me and mould me into something new. No, I can’t say this is what I had in mind, but when you join the Kingdom, you’re either all in or you’re not in, and when it comes to Christ—I mean this with no disrespect—I’m balls deep. I was about to write something down, but I just prayed on it, and I heard that soft still voice and it said not to dishonour their names, not when they’re so young, by putting them inside this room, but I miss my two girls more than anyone could ever explain even if they had all the paper in the world, all the ink. This is a fair sight harder on the three of them than it is on me. I heard that same voice when I got on the plane, when I rented that car, and, after that, well, that’s when I heard it clearest of all. But anyone thinks I hear voices must be hearing them his own self, because that’s not hearing me straight, and I don’t need anyone making up excuses for me, not when they make me look like something I’m not. I already said I know right from wrong. What I call a voice I guess you might just as well call a conscience, and you better hope you hear something from time to time. If you don’t, that means 95 you’re alone. All alone. And that’s the only Hell you need to be afraid of: the one you’re already living, that whistling wind that never stops. This, what I’m writing, is for leniency, which on my own account I don’t ask for or expect, but it’s like they told me: Think about your kids. I had to wrestle with that one for a bit because that’s an obliga- tion and a responsibility and I know that Mars Hill is going to take care of them. A lot of good people over there. All men who would have done same as I did. Still, it’s on me, I know it is. I’m their one earth daddy and if what I write here helps people understand where I’m coming from, then I don’t mind, even though already this is longer than anything I wrote since the one term I studied business at Saint Mary’s. What a golden opportunity my parents gave me. I wish I had not wasted it chugging back Smirnoff. I didn’t know the Lord then, which is almost a good thing, because wow, did I ever bust open a whole lot of commandments. Like, there was some serious defacing going on. Got no one but myself to blame for getting expelled, and it’s true: If you take a two-by-four to the window of a university police squad car with the officers still inside, you really can’t complain too much what happens, and I’m just happy they didn’t have Tasers then, because they do now. And, let’s be honest: I had a Tasering coming, like they could have Tasered me in the nuts for 30 seconds, and I think the only thing any passerby might have said would have been something like, Hit him again, dude’s on PCP! I wasn’t. I want to be clear on that. But you can get amped up pretty okay chugging back that much vodka, and I’ve never had no doings with drugs, not ever. The Rattlers basketball team had just won home to Oklahoma Christian, and one minute I’m outside Bill Greehey Arena dry humping some Kappa Delta Chi who keeps calling me ‘Papito,’ the next I’m jackhammering a stray piece of lumber through the rear left window of a cop car, sirens blaring and all. All I’m saying is, when God closes a door he opens a window, which doesn’t really make sense in this case, because seems to me like God smashed that window and then, bam, put His sandal up my ass real good, busted me all the way out the door. But, I have to be honest, it’s not like I was ever much one for writing. If you’re reading this, I guess you already guessed that. I know a lot of people made a big to-do over that episode, said it proved I had a history of violence, and with blunt instruments, but when you have been washed in the blood of the lamb, you don’t come out the same person, and I feel sorry for that 18-year-old man, so 96 scared of himself, so disrespectful of women. What a disgrace how I treated my body, how I treated the bodies of so, so many coeds, and I thank God that he has helped me in my struggle against pornog- raphy. How perverse we have made the Divine’s most sacred gift. I guess God, more than anyone, knows how much I struggled with that, which is maybe why he put me here where I am, because you hear stories about contraband in jail, but I have to say, they’ve got real good security up here or something because I have not seen a single pornographic image—not even just from the waist up—and that is how I know I have a father up above who loves me. Make me an instrument—I pray it now like I prayed it then—make me an instrument of Your grace, and even though I never went back to St. Mary’s, or any other school, I realize more and more each day how God was protecting me, saving this vessel—making sure I stayed empty—because only he knew the time and the place to anoint me with His love. I had nothing against Jervis Allison. Sure, when I first got into it with him on my wife’s Facebook page, I had some fun with his name. But it’s like I said: I never knew no Jervis before, and it’s not like I was the first person to call the guy Alice, even though I don’t think it’s right to make fun of a man’s name and I want to say right now that I was wrong about that one, and to his family—I’m writing this for you, mostly, for his family and mine, so at least there’s some record about all of this—I want to say I’m sorry. God never has yet— never will—put anyone on earth who doesn’t have some part to play in His Divine plan, and it’s not up to me to say any more than that. I have peace in my heart over what I did, and I pray to the Almighty that one day you’ll have that peace too. I know it’s not going to be easy, but learning to lean on the invisible never is. I met Kathleen at The Esquire downtown, and the truth of the matter is that God’s given me a partner for life, a partner who just keeps getting better and better looking with each passing year, smoking hot—I love you, Mama. Hot as she is now, she was on fire when she was 21, and that butt, my God, what a tush—how did it fit in those shorts? Anyway, that’s the year I met her. I’m not going to get into a whole lot of details about that except to say, me, I’m San Antonio born and bred, but she grew up in Calgary, Alberta, on account of her dad, an engineer, retired just two years ago from Shell Oil, VP Geosciences, and you don’t need to have too much college to know when a man’s done all right, left his mark on the world and, George, if these pages find their way to your hands, I just want you to know I love your baby girl, and we got some golfing to do when I get back. I’ll find some way to work on my swing, even though I don’t think they’re going to let me have any clubs here—not even a putter, not for a little 97 while at least. Kathleen was back stateside (she was born in Hous- ton) going to school (University of Texas at San Antonio—Roadrun- ners, sorry, Babe, still the worst team in the state) and now that I’ve been up here for a bit it proves a lot of what I was already thinking, and I think it was good she came back when she did because it’s not the same up here. There’s a lot of things pass for normal where she went to school that just aren’t right. It’s harder to harden your heart than it is to sit still for a second, but once people choose not to hear, shoot I don’t even think Gethsemakneel—and we are louder than any sound you’ve ever heard your entire life—could get through. I guess any man can ignore the double-bass 7/4 onslaught of the Lord is good as lost. And, if you ask me, Jervis Allison was such a man. I never had much luck finding work before I married Kathleen, but any man doesn’t look out for his kin isn’t much by me. And so, when George got me on at Shell, I took the responsibility seriously. I think it’s true, like some people said at the time, that on paper I might not have been the most qualified guy to monitor regional multistage hy- draulic fracking, but George’s recommendation carries some serious weight north of the border, and I got up to speed quick as you like. Wasn’t my first trip up to Calgary is all I’m saying, and I don’t like to hear people say I was some sort of Texas rube who didn’t understand the way things worked up here. I’m an oilman till the day I die, and I know more about any oil town than most of the people live in one. Plus—and I’m not trying to pick any fights here, like I said I’ve met folks from around here, folks I’m proud to call friends—I’m from San Antonio and that’s a real town, okay? Anyone’s a rube it was that Jervis, that jerk who kept picking fights with my wife. What was I supposed to do? At first I didn’t pay it no mind, kind of got a kick out of it to be honest. No, I’d never met anyone—and that’s a fact—who was openly gay, but like I always said, different strokes for different folks, only don’t flaunt your faults, just kneel before the Lord and you and Him together you’ll find a way. Come to think of it, I don’t even know if Jervis was gay. But he acted like it. And if there’s one thing I learned from my congregation, from real Mars men—tough in this world, yet broken before the King—it’s that there’s a right way of being a man—a King David way—and we don’t get the option of choosing weakness, not if it’s the Kingdom we seek. Sure, I took a peek at his photo albums on Facebook—Kathleen and I liked to have a laugh now and then after the kids went to bed—and, sure, I admitted as much under oath, it got my blood to boiling a bit. Yes, it’s true, Jervis and Kathleen had a thing once, but that was in senior year and she 98 didn’t have a personal relationship with the Lord then so I put that one down as a bygone. I let it fly. But, listen, does any man like to think of his woman with some other dude, especially when that other dude turns out be so scrawny? Whenever I see a man not exercis- ing, starts my mind to wonder about the rest of him, because I know he’s not whole, that kind of laziness always has a way of sneaking into a man’s way of thinking. It’s not a case of judging, it’s a case of just knowing plain and simple that anyone takes themself that far from God’s grace—like would it have killed him to do 10 push-ups a day?—may as well hang a sign over their own head inviting evil in, because it’s going to come, sure as I’m sitting here. Evil’s friendly, it likes a good party. Probably wouldn’t have come to anything, if that’s all it was. It was the trolling that did it for me. The way he told Kathleen any so-called Christian didn’t support universal healthcare—even for all those people sitting around doing drugs on welfare—wasn’t no Christian, no Christian at all. I know Kathleen trolled right on back, but if righteousness is on your side, it’s a mission, isn’t it, a Holy calling, and I encouraged her to engage. It’s why we’re put here on this mortal plane, so we can shine a light, and we both felt like this was the reason she’d gone to school up north so that now, when things really mattered, she could show people like Jervis through her own Christian example what it meant to be in this world, not just of this world. I know I posted a few things on a couple of them threads I wish I hadn’t. Times a man needs to stand up for his wife. Times a man needs to stand up for his King. And even if I got a couple of those times wrong, you still need to count me among the willing. I’m here God, send me. If I did wrong, I’ll answer on the other side, but so will you all. I hope you think on that, and so will Jervis. I guess he already has. I can’t say for sure what my intent was when I asked Jervis would he like to get a beer, but I’ve never been afraid of a good conversation, and besides, you try Calgary in February. Hotel room gets kind of lonesome. From the ninth grade on he’d gone to school with my Kathleen and we’d been hammering away at each other over Face- book for a good year. I still maintain it was the right thing to do, cordial-like, meet each other face to face, look each other in the eye. Jervis didn’t live in Calgary anymore, he’d moved to a town called Creston. Like I said, even though I’m from Texas and used to wide, open spaces, I still didn’t gauge the distance correctly. By the time I got there, I wasn’t in the best frame of mind. Those roads. My God, those roads. Avis should have made me get four-wheel drive, but it’s true, I didn’t tell them I planned on crossing no border. I had the 99 weekend off and the plan was me and Jervis’d meet for a drink Fri- day night at Jimmy’s Pub and Grill. I was staying in the same hotel, The Creston, and Jervis was the one steered me there. Said if I liked wings, Jimmy’s was a place like no other. I knew Jervis was patron- izing me on account of I knew him, sort of, in that Facebook way, and I knew no way did he eat wings, drink beer, shoot pool, none of that stuff, but you never judge a man who shows you hospitality. Something about seeing a metrosexual away from the city doesn’t sit right with me; it’s all in the name, isn’t it? I saw the way the locals looked at Jervis, and I saw the way they looked at me on account of sitting with Jervis, and it’s not like the man had a lisp or anything, but there were things about his hair, things about his shoes that just weren’t right, and yes, the wings were as good as he said—he ordered teriyaki, and I ate 30 hot—but I’d never sat across from a man believed killing babies was right, and when I saw no amount of reasoning from me was going to change his mind, I knew what was next. I figure I knew he was a doctor, and that that’s why he’d moved out to these parts, easier to start a practice, but when he started describ- ing the procedure itself—so much suction—to help me understand, when he said it wasn’t no different, like he said, all it amounted to was ‘cutting off a wart,’ well, okay, I lost it a bit. Hadn’t drank a ton of water, and the cold, the way it freezes things up your nostrils, felt like an invasion, and there wasn’t no amount of beer—although I tried—that was ever going to get me back to that normal place. Maybe I didn’t come at things the right way. Could be I should have just gone upstairs. God knows I was tired, could have used the rest. But after we said our good nights—Jervis tried to hug me, but I gave him a knuckle bump, a sign of things to come—I put myself behind the wheel of my rented Impala, and I trailed him down the road apiece. He didn’t live too far away—good 20-minute drive through the snow and the darkness—and when I saw him signal into a country lane, I turned too, and it was just the pressure of my right foot—like some power beyond me had pressed it for me—that sped me past him, which is when I jammed on the brakes and forced him to stop. We both got out, and I guess I could see a little concern on his face, even though he tried to play it cool. ‘Mr. Mann,’ he said, ‘forget something at the bar?’ I just laid into him after that, and it was like I thought, Jervis had no defence, even for some basic fist work, and I guess that just made me madder. A man’s got to be prepared, don’t he? After he was down, 100 I took the keys out of his pants pocket and opened his trunk. He had a bag of clubs in there, including a real nice set of Callaway Diablos. I didn’t look over them too much, but I know now, they tell me it was a four-iron that I took to his head. My kids might read this in the future so I don’t want to glorify what I did, all I can say is that it was only a single swing—anything else you hear is a lie—and that if it’d been a golf ball I’d have cleared 200 yards. I just leaned into it. It was a clear night, and except for that finalbing ! the whole thing had been on mute, but the quiet picked up the pitch and it got caught in the air like my breath, like the steam from Jervis’s head, and it seemed like the opening note to that chorus we played on Sundays sometimes: Deep and wide, deep and wide! There’s a fountain flow- ing deep and wide! I knew that I’d stayed empty for just this moment because I filled with this verse and, if none of this had been God’s will then why had I created a wound that looked like a hymn, why did iron on bone strike perfect C, and why did the note float in the air like that, like an angel held it there, willed it with wings to sing out long so I would know, even then, that I was not alone? Would I have turned myself in? I can’t answer that. By the time I got back to Calgary there were all sorts of police waiting outside the Palliser and before I had a chance to think about anything, someone was saying, ‘Andrew Mann? You’re under arrest for the murder of Jervis Allison.’ It’s all been a bit of a blur since then. Maybe it wasn’t my right to trust Jervis to God, but that’s done now. I don’t know if it’s true anymore that things are darkest before the dawn, because right now the only sun for me is fluorescent and constant, and I tell myself that this also is His will because God’s light takes many forms, just like His love does, and maybe I was just another shape and hue, me and the Diablo iron. Not all of us are made to be so fine. There’s beauty in the blunt, and all I wanted was to be His instrument and anything else, the truth is, I don’t fret it, not too much.

101 Reviews

Fiction

Carrie Snyder, The Juliet Stories, House of Anansi, 2012 Cary Fagan, My Life Among the Apes, Cormorant, 2012

Novels tend to rule the competition for the most prominent literary awards in fiction, so the short story collections fortunate enough to earn nominations almost always pique my interest. In 2012, The Juliet Stories by Carrie Snyder made the short list for the Governor General’s Award; Cary Fagan’s delightfully titled collection My Life Among the Apes secured a spot on the Giller Prize long list. Snyder is a relative newcomer on the scene, The Juliet Stories being her second book, while Fagan is an established, award-winning author of five adult novels and numerous children’s books. Although neither collection ultimately took home a prize, and they differ greatly in structure, style and content, a devoted short-story fan can see how these authors received the coveted nods from the prize juries.

The Juliet Stories is a vibrantly imagined novel-in-stories in the real- 102 ist mode, told from a present tense, third-person perspective, closely following the title character for the majority of the book. The nine stories comprising Part One occur in post-revolutionary Nicaragua, 1984, with the Friesen family stepping off a plane at the opening of the story ‘Rat.’ Bram and Gloria Friesen, peace activists with the Roots of Justice, and parents of 10-year-old Juliet and her brothers Keith and Emmanuel, have moved to Managua to protest the Amer- ican involvement in the civil war. From the start, Snyder pulls us in with her precise descriptions of the tumultuous setting. The palpable fear and danger imbedded in the details propel this story and the others in this section:

The city is falling down, or already fallen. Dark green canopied vehicles, spilling with soldiers, cruise the streets. Among shacks and shanties run skinny dogs and loose pigs. Children dart towards the truck to touch Juliet’s hand, fingers scratching, papery and dry, as they cross her knuckles. Managua smells like cooking fires, like the sultry burn of incense.

Snyder packs her linked narratives with lively, unusual, sometimes inventive diction, and in most cases, her choices successfully shape the observant, dream-like perspective of preadolescent Juliet. Occasionally Snyder’s prose jars, such as in the story ‘Borrowers’ when Juliet ‘rabbits herself hunched and blinking’—I had to pause for a moment to picture how someone might ‘rabbit’ herself—but on the whole, the rapid-fire, amped-up language strikingly comple- ments the emotional intensity underpinning the scenes. The stakes in this section remain high throughout as the family smacks into obstacles not only physically, but also emotionally, revealing the cracks in Bram and Gloria’s marriage and the stress the children face in the ravaged, foreign environment. In ‘She Will Leave a Mark,’ Keith is temporarily lost when the family attends a political rally. Gloria embarks on an affair with a German expat while Bram grows more deeply immersed in the Roots of Justice mission. Part One ends with an unforeseen but believable turn as young Keith is diagnosed with cancer, forcing the Friesens back north, and home. The first part of The Juliet Stories takes place under unique, grip- ping circumstances, relayed in a day-to-day time span. Part Two faces the task of holding our intrigue as its narrative shifts to a completely different setting with more conventional subject matter, scattered over a greater period of time. In stories such as ‘The Four Corners of a House,’ the narration delves into the perspectives of Gloria and Bram in addition to a maturing Juliet, and the historical story ‘Girls’ told to Juliet by her grandmother takes place in postwar Germany. While this departure into the lives of other characters expands the overall nar- 103 rative, I missed the internal preoccupations of Juliet in the Nicaragua stories and the excitement of the previous section. Keith’s illness is perhaps the most poignant, memorable event in Part Two, largely due to the bond between Juliet and her brother that Snyder so insightfully depicts in Nicaragua:

She loves her brother—but is this retrospect? They have the capacity to argue over the most insignificant subjects, over who sits where, over who saw what first; they toss magic phrases at each other like amulets, lists of words that have weight only because they’ve agreed between the two of them that they do...

The events which follow Keith’s battle, including Juliet’s trials falling in love, have a hard time measuring up to the intensity of all that has come before. Yet they inevitably answer the pressing question that arises at the conclusion of Part Two, namely, what is going to happen to this weary young family upon returning from a war zone? Snyder might have avoided answering the question and ended The Juliet Stories on the flight home from Nicaragua. Instead, she plun- ges headlong to meet the challenge, and the latter half reveals some of the pitfalls inherent in the novel-in-stories form. For linked stories do create a novel-like time continuum and scope, allowing for greater unity and character development. But the novel-in-stories is ultimately not a novel, and unity does not necessarily evoke resonance. In the case of The Juliet Stories, the last few stories feel somewhat strained, losing steam as the book heads toward its conclusion. Still, Snyder has successfully drawn a riveting portrayal of Reagan-era Nicaragua and a shaken gringo family whose members struggle to recover in the aftermath of their experience.

The 10 stories in Cary Fagan’s collection My Life Among the Apes first appeared in publications such as The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead and Best Canadian Stories. Filled with flawed, idiosyn- cratic characters and situations, these contemporary tales take place in locales from Toronto to Cape Cod, New York City to Germany. Fagan spins his darkly humorous yarns in an assured, deceptive- ly simple prose. These characters are utterly believable, the voices ringing clear and true, springing deep from complex lives. Consider this passage from the opening story, ‘The Floating Wife,’ in which a woman reflects on her husband’s life as a magician, and the events which led to her eventually leaving him:

You must understand, I know that my husband worked extremely hard 104 at a job of tremendous pressure. He was an otherwise attentive husband and a good father, and he never wavered in his support of my own career as a doctor... I would have stayed with him, no matter how sick I became of phrases such as ‘forcing,’ ‘penetration frame,’ and ‘coin clip,’ or how often at a dinner party he would unscrew the top of the salt shaker, pour the contents into his hand, and then throw it at the guest across the table only to have the salt vanish. I would have stayed if, after his retirement, he had not decided—no, insisted—on turning professional.

In this story, and the others in the collection, a thread of tension pulls the reader through with surprising turns and unforeseeable but satisfying resolutions. Neither the magician’s wife nor the reader sees the famous trick of the story’s title, which is an unexpected twist considering how Fagan has planted the premise of ‘the floating wife’ from the beginning. But this does not feel disappointing for, by the end, we realize the trick doesn’t matter. The story is about the wife’s relationship with her husband and the understanding and misunderstandings that come with a life-long marriage. Several of the stories touch on romantic relationships, including ‘The Brooklyn Revenge’—a twisted tale of a widow who moves to New York City to confront her husband’s long-time mistress, only to find the woman living alone with terminal cancer. While affairs, heart attacks and loneliness hardly make for unfamiliar territory in contemporary literature, Fagan’s approach to his subject rings fresh and funny, as far from well-worn as you can get; each story contains the emotional resonance of a novel. I would have happily read another 10. My Life Among the Apes exemplifies the best of what short fiction can do. Both his collection and Snyder’s earned their notable positions on the award stage.

— Vanessa Blakeslee

Pasha Malla, People Park, House of Anansi, 2012 Teresa McWhirter, Five Little Bitches, Anvil, 2012

In 2006, Douglas Coupland wrote an essay for his New York Times blog arguing that CanLit is a stagnant field, exclusively representa- tive of an increasingly non-existent facet of Canadian life. Coupland was drawing a distinction between literature produced in Canada (like his writing) and capital-C CanLit as historically constructed by the literary establishment. CanLit, Coupland argued, is depressing and rural and bleak, and as such it does not represent the realities of contemporary Canadian life. 105 How lucky for us that Coupland was so wrong! While sometimes, like around Canada Reads time, it can feel as though Canadian literature overwhelmingly celebrates historical narratives of rural Prairie or Maritime life, contemporary Canadian literature is as varied as any other national literature. Stories of the urban and the modern predominate. Pasha Malla’s People Park and Teresa McWhirter’s Five Little Bitches are two such examples. In their contrasting examina- tions of the contemporary urban landscape, Malla and McWhirter probe questions of isolation and loneliness even for those seemingly deeply entrenched within idealized communities. For Malla, the perfect cityscape cannot protect its citizens from malaise; for McWhirter, the sisterhood of an all-girl punk band is not immune to unravelling. For both authors, the urban jungle is a backdrop for rich contemporary narratives.

Pasha Malla’s latest offering is a speculative novel about urban dysto- pia that asks whether it is possible to construct a perfect city. People Park is set in an island city, connected to the mainland only by the forebodingly named Guardian Bridge. The community is entirely self- sufficient and residents rarely leave (the mayor, whose insularity is a point of pride, asserts that she sees no reason to live elsewhere). The community is celebrating the excitement of the Silver Jubilee of People Park, a central, idyllic gathering place that is both the heart of the community and symbolic of progress in this unnamed fictional municipality. Of course, as in any good utopia, progress isn’t really progress, and around the edges of the city we have a sense that things are falling apart. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the centre of this community cannot hold. A magician of sorts—an illustrationist, in the parlance of the text—named Raven has come to town osten- sibly to provide a stirring and dramatic centrepiece to the festivities, but really he becomes the catalyst of the city’s unravelling. As a dys- topian tale, the progress of the narrative is relatively predictable and straightforward. As I read through People Park, however, I found myself discovering layered complexity not in the narrative itself but in the echoes I saw in the city around me. I am a recent transplant to the Vancouver area and with my semi- outsider status I found it almost impossible not to weave Vancouver in between the lines of Malla’s nameless city—with its dependence on a bridge connection to the world beyond (but a deep-seated dis- trust of those who live outside the privileged city’s borders), its tour- ist-trap neighbourhood of gas lamps populated by disdainful and 106 impatient residents, its abandoned and impoverished underclass, and a sense of self-satisfaction in the creation of what they imagine to be a socially just wonderland that actually leaves out so many. It’s a place that thinks itself ideal but allows the marginalized to become ever more marginal. Even the city’s fate at the end of the novel is not dissimilar to predictions of Vancouver’s own. So is this a cautionary tale for Canada’s youngest ‘City of the End of Things’? The intention behind the novel is not altogether clear. Fans of Pasha Malla’s careful, deliberate prose as witnessed in his celebrated The Withdrawal Method will be surprised by People Park, a messy, sprawling novel. It features a huge cast of characters and a number of unresolved plotlines, and there are probably narrative portions that could have been excised to deliver a more streamlined and focused text. As a result, the depth of the novel’s message is diluted and its nature murky. But the book is also pleasurable in its excess, even if occasionally bewildering (the reader can feel as much an outsider at times as the character Kellogg Poole and his children). Malla intentionally does not orient us in this text, but leaves us to discover the world as it emerges. Brave choices abound here, and even those that do not altogether work are evidence of a welcome overreaching in a complex, creative fiction. ■ Teresa McWhirter’s drug-fueled tour novel of hard-living punk prin- cesses has People Park’s scope and breadth with a much more focused narrative and cast of characters. In Five Little Bitches, we are on the road with Wet Leather, an all-girl punk outfit from Vancouver who are out to take the boy’s club of hardcore music by storm. As readers, we follow the ladies of Wet Leather from their beginnings as a group of women just looking to jam, to an internationally successful concern. Driven by the tragic desire for attention of lead singer Maxine and the steady musical chops of guitarist Fanta, the women are by turns emotional disasters and punk wonders. Whether or not they can keep it together—either the band collectively or their fra- gile selves individually—is the suspenseful, lingering question of the narrative. In some ways, Five Little Bitches is an estrogen-fueled response to the testosterone-soaked failure in the pages of Michael Turner’s 1993 verse novel Hard Core Logo. The women of Wet Leather roll just as hard as the men of Hard Core Logo do, and they date characters who could be analogues for Turner’s male musicians. In both texts, the road weighs heavily on the soul and the musicians pay a steep cost. In both texts, as readers, we wonder if the price is worth it. Refreshingly though, where Hard Core Logo was largely about male competition, Five Little Bitches is a novel about female friendship, 107 and it both celebrates the strength of the bonds possible between women and questions the social structures that make female friendship challenging. The women in the novel find it easier to forgive male trespasses against them than female ones, and this becomes fodder for McWhirter’s questioning (but never judgmental) gaze. Likewise, the varied and often problematic ways the women represent and es- pouse feminism, or fail to, provide a space for critical questioning in the novel. McWhirter is not easy on her fallible and flawed protagonists, and she does not idealize them. These are not perfect women embodying perfect politics. As a result, their travails feel honest and it is easy to find empathy for the characters. This is not a novel for everyone, and sensitive readers may find Mc- Whirter’s raw prose difficult to take; the women are punk rockers and use vernacular appropriate to their world and experience. The stark title seems downright quaint juxtaposed with the vulgarity of the text. At one point, a character describes her boring sexual relationship with her ex-boyfriend by saying, ‘Getting my period was more exciting, on days with heavy flow.’ These women are vulgar; it’s part of the per- formance of an aggressive femininity that they embody, and it renders them much more honest and realistic as a result. They fit their world and have been moulded by it; the result is a novel with dialogue that rings true even (and perhaps especially) when it is, occasionally, un- comfortable in its truth. Mostly though, this novel is an awful lot of fun. McWhirter’s clear love for her protagonists comes through in the narrative and she de- lights in weaving their stories. They are angry and flawed and sometimes broken, but they are also strong women whose capacity for love—primarily for each other—overshadows their shortcomings. As readers we root for Wet Leather to succeed against unlikely odds, and when the women struggle with the demons of booze, drugs and men, we root for them, too. The book’s playfulness extends to the form of the text itself, with each page a sensory overload of mar- ginalia that makes the experience of reading feel more like flipping through a scrapbook than reading traditional prose fiction. The result is a novel that feels as loud, as raucous, and as sexually charged as a Wet Leather concert. — Brenna Clarke Gray

108 Heather Birrell, Mad Hope, Coach House Books, 2012 Dorothy Speak, Reconciliation, Dorothy Speak, 2012

On the cover of Heather Birrell’s Mad Hope, Annabel Lyon says this ‘gorgeously written’ collection belongs ‘in the short story pantheon with Alice Munro, Lisa Moore and Zsuzsi Gartner.’ That placement makes some sense. Birrell has Munro’s clear photographic eye combined with Moore’s graceful narrative and Gartner’s quirky humour. These stories explore the broad themes of life and love, family, friendship, betrayal and death, but Birrell’s settings and situations are specific and peculiar, and her voice is precise and authentic. From a Canadian classroom to an Ecuadorian jungle, she examines human behaviour in its most mundane or macabre extremes, always with a poignancy that creates reader empathy. In ‘Frogs,’ Naadiya, a Somali Muslim girl, approaches her science teacher to ask for help in terminating her pregnancy. Her teacher, formerly a doctor in Ceauşescu’s pronatalist regime, agrees to help the young woman. The story circles around the helplessness Vasile felt before escaping from Romania and coming to Canada, the victim- ization of women under political, religious or patriarchal domination, and the casual exploitation of vulnerable creatures. He thinks of recent conversations with his daughter who accuses him of having been complicit in Ceauşescu’s schemes, and recalls his wife’s courage in procuring an illegal abortion in Romania, going to jail while refusing to give the name of the woman who assisted her. As a teacher, Vasile leads his students through the dissections of frogs ‘as quickly and clinically as possible,’ and in response to his daughter’s accusations, he acknowledges that the frogs most of all represent the horror, pain and guilt of his past in Romania: ‘...more than anything, I remember the frogs. I dream them in their many incarnations and contortions. I weep for them the way I cannot for the women, for the babies born half-formed or badly loved.’ The frogs, imported in ‘droves,’ were injected with the women’s urine to test for pregnancy. ‘[T]he beauty was that the frog[s] remained alive and could be used again.’ Their for- titude meant their enslavement; ultimately, the frogs were ‘worked... to death.’ The image of those tortured creatures resonates throughout these stories. Children and adults alike witness murder, suicide, the sudden deaths of friends and family, yet survive and endure. ‘The heart is pretty central,’ Vasile instructs his biology students as they dissect their frogs, and this statement describes Vasile’s response to Naadiya as well as Birrell’s approach to the people in her stories. The frog image on the book’s cover is iconic in relation to pregnancy, vulnerability and choices about life and death. The question of pregnancy, seeking it or terminating it, is the focus of other stories. ‘No One Else Really Wants to Listen’ takes place in 109 an online chat group where expectant mothers share stories, opin- ions and advice. The pro-life and pro-choice arguments are trotted out in surprisingly articulate accounts (unlikely, perhaps, in an actual chat group), which illustrate the intense emotions, hopes, disappointments, blame and anger that so often colour judgment in what is an always intensely complicated and usually unresolved discussion. Sometimes humorous, sometimes heart-breaking, the voices are vital and persuasive. Both the genuinely charitable and coldly inhumane responses are adroitly presented, illustrating the topic’s complexity. In ‘Wanted Children,’ a childless couple struggles with disappointment and despair after failed attempts to conceive followed by a pregnancy that ends in miscarriage. Beth sees strollers as ‘little buggies of anguish’ and wants to ‘spray-paint their protective sides, slash their UV-blocking visors.’ Her husband proposes they go on a trip to Cuyabeno National Park in the Amazon where Beth encounters and longs for a village girl’s nameless child. She inquires about the possibility of taking her home but is rejected. She wonders why people’s wounds can’t match up and notes ‘how rarely people’s plans and yearnings find their proper, perfect form.’ Despite desperate circumstances and terrible timing, her people usually find ways to cope. In ‘My Friend Taisie,’ Thomas supports his friend Taisie through pregnancy and childbirth as a way of dealing with the suicide of his partner. Taisie remarks, ‘Just living, it can be an accomplishment, can’t it?’ In the last story of this collection, ‘Impossible to Die in Your Dreams,’ the setting is a wedding with the story told through the bride’s sister and grandmother’s recalling a lifetime of memories involving abuse, betrayal and disappointment. The overall tone of the story, however, is hopeful, even joyful, con- cluding with the bride placing her bouquet on her grandmother’s lap, a friend telling an off-key joke and the grandmother laughing and knowing in her heart that ‘timing or no, this is good.’

The book jacket for Dorothy Speak’s self-published Reconciliation also compares her storytelling to that of Alice Munro as well as Joyce Carol Oates. Like Birrell, Speak covers the territory of family, marriage and friendship, but her perspective is very different. High- lighting the minutiae of daily activities, she relentlessly reveals the pettiness and self-absorption of her characters and their failure both to live up to their own potential and to form good relationships with their partners, friends or children. It is difficult to like any of these people, yet Speak brings the reader inside their heads and hearts. She forces readers to recognize circumstances and impulses that 110 shape her characters’ unfortunate choices and lack of action—all of which lead to inevitably tragic outcomes. As outlandish as many of the betrayals and infidelities may be, the stories are told with accuracy of description and detail that make them believable. In ‘The Opposite of Truth,’ Benta meets intermittently with her cancer-ridden friend Lourdes, and the two exchange insults about their attitudes towards wigs versus hats for cancer victims. Lourdes, who has slept with Benta’s ex-husband, takes up with her friend’s current lover, causing Benta to spray-paint obscenities on the man’s car and then make an appointment to see, and perhaps seduce, Lourdes’s healer. The narrator tells us, ‘The reason their friendship has endured is that they’ve always felt free to tell each other the opposite of the truth.’ Like most relationships in these stories, this friendship consists of entertaining dialogue and considerable drama but lacks any depth of compassion or empathy. Dark undertones lurk in all these stories. ‘A Penny to Save’ starts with ‘a queer feeling in the room’ when the father lifts his five-year- old daughter from the table and threatens to smear butter on her belly. Later, outside the home, the father’s friend lures the girl into sexual foreplay while in the background her brother practices his yoyo to the steady incantation of nursery rhymes. In the final story, ‘The Prime of His Life,’ 65-year-old Purdy, who has devoted his life to indulging his self-absorbed wife Madonna, caters to her dying wishes. Meanwhile, their son Winslow, after a lifetime of abuse and neglect, refuses to see his mother. Purdy brings Madonna designer clothes from the extensive wardrobe she has purchased through years of frenzied spending and perpetuates the ‘charade’ that she is not a patient in a terminal care ward. She shrinks to a grotesque caricature of herself: ‘Her earlobes drooped under the weight of heavy costume jewellery.... On her shrunken feet, her shoes floated.’ Her shakily applied lipstick, rouge and mas- cara have ‘a burlesque effect.’ She ‘stood out like a Christmas tree. It was what she wanted. She needed to be noticed.’ Winslow refuses to go to his mother’s funeral and sums her up as a ‘fourteen-carat phoney.’ Purdy ultimately realizes that it was a sin to have been so enamoured of his vain wife that he has ignored and failed his son. He concludes that he ‘had displayed an egregious lack.’ One way or another, most of the people in this collection—nar- cissistic, self-serving, exploitive or merely foolish—display an egregious lack. Yet Speak’s exquisite attention to the bleak, painful details of their lives leaves the reader wishing that there could be some kind of deliverance or, as the book’s title suggests, reconciliation. With an echo of Margaret Atwood, whose blurb on the back of the book describes Speak as ‘a wonderful new short story writer,’ two of these stories suggest that hope may be found not through human 111 interaction but in the natural environment. ‘Authenticity’ concludes, ‘The light thrown off the lake is transcendent, devastating, redemp- tive,’ and the final sentence in ‘Surcease of Surrow’ is ‘The river’s steadfastness, its neutrality, its senseless beauty strengthened and soothed her.’ Albeit remote, there is some sense of hope here.

Any Canadian woman who writes short stories is likely to be com- pared to Alice Munro, but Munro is in a class of her own. Nonethe- less, these two books contain good stories, carefully written, that describe recognizable and moving human portraits and interactions. Birrell’s writing is more powerfully engaging than Speak’s, but both writers have produced stimulating short-story collections that merit attention. — Carol Matthews Poetry

George Fetherling, Plans Deranged by Time: The Poetry of George Fetherling, edited by A.F. Moritz, Wilfrid Laurier University, 2012 Patrick Friesen, A Dark Boat, Anvil, 2012 Anne Szumigalski, A Woman Clothed in Words, edited by Mark Abley, Coteau, 2012

I should begin with a personal confession: Despite having seen George Fetherling’s poems in journals, I was unaware until this book of the quality, the volume, or the range of his work, which came as a revelation. His poetry is not easily categorized, as it blends qualities that do not so often co-exist in Canadian poetry, such as wit, infor- mality and broad social awareness. For despite his editor A.F. Mor- itz’s downplaying of this aspect, Fetherling is a public and political poet. Like Gary Geddes or the Dennis Lee of Civil Elegies, he takes on major issues such as the individual in the community and our ignorance and neglect of history, albeit from a decidedly subjective perspective. He is no casual bystander, but a concerned witness. Yet his stance is resolutely unrhetorical. His plain, informal and laconic language has Audenesque overtones, but is not self-con- 112 sciously ‘street language.’ Thoughtful and contemplative rather than intellectual, Fetherling is self-taught: as he writes at the end of ‘First Signs of Wartime Spring,’ ‘whatever I know I’ve learned by/eaves- dropping.’ Thus, though it sometimes feels as if he is manipulating abstractions, and he certainly does not avoid large generalizations, they come across as findings, the result of inner argument rather than impositions of grid-like predigested meaning. This is partly because such conclusions are anchored in very precise imagery, as here in ‘Memorandum for the File’:

another such day long ago

when morning was finally revealed once silence reached a crisis then broke like a fever.

Notice how that last line break before ‘crisis’ enacts the meaning—a tiny detail perhaps, but indicative of true poetic skill in cadence and verse movement. It is apparent, too, in the superb timing at the start of ‘Ancient Beliefs’:

Here we do not worship ancestors we treat them for what they are, part memory, part parasitic affliction.

He finishes with this:

It is also our belief that what’s not paradox is allegory.

This ending feels more than a neat dictum because of the argument and the imagery that have preceded it. The images are not simply precise and evocative; they are also witty. While broad humour is rampant in Canadian poetry, not to mention the current fashion for high octane whimsy, Fetherling is one of few Canadian poets—Susan Glickman, Don Coles, Don Mc- Kay and Gary Geddes are others—who could be termed witty. Many of his poems tend toward aperçu or epigram. The reader is constantly surprised by an unexpected analogy. This sometimes begets an incidental felicity, as in ‘Radio,’ where the poet sees multiple couplings:

...too many vacancies and embalmed businesses and railyards where the only sound of life 113 is freight trains having rusty sex...

But often, as in excerpts from ‘Singer,’ a book-length elegy for his father, the wit provides a way of encapsulating a hard-earned disillu- sion that is central to the exploratory nature of his work:

I think of him photographing a buddy of his then turning the camera on himself.

A click rings out. An image falls to the ground.

Such lines give us the bracing verbal equivalent of a cold shower. Especially when combined with his implicitly ironic stance and the way he handles the longer line, his methods recall more the medita- tive Don Coles than Auden, enabling him to sinuously embody and articulate the twists and turns of his thinking and feeling. Though A.F. Moritz in his erudite and densely allusive introduction rightly notes that Fetherling’s ‘melancholy awareness’ displaces any overtly political engagement, he seems to me to spend too long discussing the social role of the contemporary poet or man of letters rather than focusing on details in the poetry that might add to the reader’s understanding and enjoyment. He does, however, bring out those elements of Fetherling’s critical self-examination that underlie his empathy for members of the similarly disillusioned wider community, and makes a good case for recommending Fetherling’s poetry to the expanded audience it deserves.

Patrick Friesen’s A Dark Boat maintains and expands upon the qualities we have come to expect from his poetry: an interest in the ele- mental combined with a gift for brilliant, intense simplicity, the kind that cannot be faked, such as this from ‘Balcony’:

god only knows and blesses them the way a still wind unnerves the leaves

The title poem ends with

the fadista sang of a dark boat

you make do with the night you have

114 And in ‘Rua Azul’ we find a ‘satanic cat infesting a doorstep.’ Unlike the Canada of his earlier books, these poems inhabit a familiar sunstruck Iberian landscape dominated by song, especially the Portuguese fado, mules, blood, guitars, Lorca, love and death. There are many details to admire, but unless I have overlooked some major unifying theme, these poems, interspersed at times with black and white photos, build to a series of discrete images, declarations and situations that are remarkable less for a shared context than for a common atmosphere and tone. Like ghazals or some Imagist poems, A Dark Boat’s poems are to be read, heard and accepted rather than to be argued with and analyzed: They make declarations and affirmations and conjure vivid scenes that I can admire for their colour and musicality even while they do not touch me emotionally.

Anne Szumigalski came to Canada as a young adult, one of a relatively small number of British poets who have contributed to recent Canadian poetry. The others include Robin Skelton, Peter Stevens, Christopher Wiseman, Patience Wheatley, John Thompson and Mark Abley, who is Anne Szumigalski’s literary executor and editor of this volume—but when set in the Canadian literary mosaic among, say, Italian, Greek, Japanese, Chilean or even US poets, their work might seem small and inconsequential. Some linguistic and cultural tran- sitions are easier and therefore less exciting than others: While re- taining much of her Englishness, Szumigalski takes on, and in her poetry embodies, crucial aspects of the Prairies. Abley makes the best case he can for these chronologically arranged remains, but even he concedes:

Like so many writers, Anne had long struggled to find and fine-tune her voice. The poems published in the first section of this book may not always be successful, but they are always interesting—and the interest derives partly from the hard labour they reveal. The disappointments and false starts that she suffered made Woman Reading in Bath possible.

Unlike some of her male counterparts, Szumigalski wears her role as poet lightly. Speaking in 1974 of the sense of community that she found in Saskatchewan, she says,

I write mostly about people, their tragedies and loves and quirks. I am happy with the various groups and individuals with whom I have written; whom I have helped; who have helped me. I suppose, that in a place of great spaces and few people, every person is more important than he is in the crowded countries of the Old World.

Whether true or not, the first drafts assembled here, along with some hitherto unpublished and mostly untitled poems, certainly dis- 115 play a bracing directness and a determination to communicate, as in ‘People of the Bog’:

As I stood by and watched a leathery grandfather was brought up out of the peat the third that day they lay in a row on the stiff heather

they in their tattered skin and thongs, shackled by rings to their rusted broken dirks

Here and especially in the later prose pieces, such as ‘Story of the Heartberry,’ which is attractively told, as well as in the early versions of plays, one wonders about the intended audience for this book. The repetitiveness of the ‘Litanies,’ for instance, can perhaps be valued only by those who share the poet’s religious faith. Those who had met or already knew the author may well find this volume an endearing addition, but because of its lack of inner coherence I doubt that it will serve for others as a good introduction to her work. — Christopher Levenson Notes on Contributors

DARREN BIFFORD is the author of time between Vancouver and Kelowna, Wedding in Fire Country (Nightwood where she teaches at UBC Okanagan. Editions, 2012). He lives in Montreal. BRENNA CLARKE GRAY holds a PhD in VANESSA BLAKESLEE’s fiction, essays Canadian Literature from the Uni- and reviews have been published, or versity of New Brunswick, where are forthcoming, in The Paris Review she was a Canada Graduate Schol- Daily, The Southern Review, The Globe ar. She teaches Canadian Literature and Mail, Quill & Quire and Ascent, (among other things) at Douglas among others. In 2012 she was one College and is at work on her first of four recipients of an Individual Art- book, a study of Douglas Coupland. ist Fellowship in Literature from the MARK HOROSKY is a special needs Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. instructor and the author of three Visit vanessablakeslee.com. chapbooks: Let It Be Nearby (Cue CLINT BURNHAM has had work pub- Editions), Fabulous Beasts (The lished in West Coast Line and The Equalizer) and More Frisk Than Risk Capilano Review. His most recent book (Flying Guillotine Press). He lives in of poetry is The Benjamin Sonnets Brooklyn, NY, with his family. 2009 (BookThug, ). CHRIS HUTCHINSON is the author of three books of poetry, most recently A LOUISE CARSON’s book Rope: A Tale Told in Prose and Verse was pub- Brief History of the Short-Lived (Night- wood Editions, 2012). lished in 2011 by Broken Rules 117 Press. Mermaid Road will be avail- CHRISTOPHER LEVENSON was a co- able from the same press in 2013. founder and first editor ofARC , organ- Her work has appeared in various izer of the ARC Reading Series and journals, including Other Voices, Series Editor of Carleton University Vallum, subTerrain, Geist, Prairie Press’s Harbinger imprint for first Fire, CV2 and The Montreal Review. books of poetry. He is the author of 10 books of poetry, most recently Local MARGARET CHRISTAKOS’s most recent Time (StoneFlower, 2006). His next chapbook is The Chips & Ties Study book, Night Vision, will appear with (2012, BookThug). A new poetry col- Quattro this fall. lection, Multitudes, will emerge from Coach House (Fall 2013). Her publishing RACHEL MARSTON’s prose has re- history of nine books includes Welling cently appeared in The Collagist, Re- (2010)—A Globe 100 Book; What Stirs ligion & Politics and American Fiction (2008)—a Pat Lowther Award nominee; Volume 12. She received her PhD in and Excessive Love Prostheses (2002)— Literature and Creative Writing from winner of the ReLit Poetry Award. the University of Utah. In Fall 2013, she will join the College of Saint Ben- ANNE FLEMING, three books has she— edict and Saint John’s University as who once was a technical editor at an an assistant professor of English. Ontario government ministry where worked several German engineers who CAROL MATTHEWS is the author of a before their verbs their nouns put— collection of short stories, Incidental Gay Dwarves of America (Pedlar, 2012), Music (Oolichan, 2006), and three Anomaly (Raincoast, 2005) and Pool- works of creative non-fiction. She Hopping (Polestar, 1998). She divides her lives on Protection Island, BC. SACHIKO MURAKAMI is the author of COLIN SNOWSELL lives in Vernon, The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, BC, where he is a professor in the 2008) and Rebuild (Talonbooks, 2011). Department of Communications at She lives in Toronto where she is Okanagan College. His work has Poetry Editor for Insomniac Press. Her appeared in Prairie Fire, This Maga- collaborative online poetry projects are zine, Maisonneuve, PopMatters and at projectrebuild.ca, powellstreethenko. Ryga. His novella The Frollett Home- ca and getmeoutofhere-poems.tumblr. stead was published in 2010 by the com. Okanagan Institute.

MARK MUSHET is a photographer, AYELET TSABARI is the author of the videographer, art director, book- short story collection The Best Place cover designer and publisher. He on Earth (HarperCollins, 2013). A two- is currently adapting three of Eliza- time winner of EVENT’s Non-Fiction beth Bachinsky’s poems from her Contest, her writing also appeared new collection, The Hottest Summer in PRISM international, Room, Grain, in Recorded History, to a medium he Prairie Fire and the anthology Slice abandoned 15 years ago, but is now Me Some Truth. She lives in Toronto happily reacquainted with: high-def and at ayelettsabari.com. poetics. GILLIAN WIGMORE’s most recent book BILLEH NICKERSON is the author of is Dirt of Ages (Nightwood Editions, four books, including The Asthmatic 2012). She has a book of fiction and Glassblower, McPoems and Impact: a book of poems forthcoming in The Titanic Poems. A new collection, 2014. She lives in Prince George, BC. Artificial Cherry, is forthcoming (Ar- 118 senal Pulp, 2014). He is a former editor CHANGMING YUAN, four-time Push- of both EVENT and PRISM internation- cart nominee, grew up in rural China al. He lives in Vancouver and is Chair and published several monographs of the Creative Writing department at before moving to Canada. With a Kwantlen Polytechnic University. PhD in English, he works as a private tutor in Vancouver, where he edits SCOTT RANDALL is the author of two and publishes Poetry Pacific with his short story collections from Signa- teenaged poet-son Allen Qing Yuan. ture Editions: Last Chance to Renew His poetry appears in 669 journals/ (2006) and Character Actor (2008). He anthologies in 25 countries. recently received grants from the City of Ottawa and the Ontario Arts Council to complete a third book, Parents of Children. ‘And to Say Hello’ is part of the collection.

ARMAND GARNET RUFFO recently co- edited a new edition of An Anthol- ogy of Canadian Native Literature in English (Oxford University Press, 2013). His poetry has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2010 (Tightrope Books). He currently lives in Ottawa and teaches at Carleton University. WE HOPE YOU’VE ENJOYED THIS COMPLIMENTARY ISSUE

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EVENTMAGAZINE.CA Sachiko Murakami My quandary now is how to be a writer in recovery, now that my survival isn’t so fundamentally attached to writing. There is a part of me that wants the edge back, that insistent, delirious, desperate tumble through language as though my life depended on it.

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