Continuing our Writing Spaces series, we’re taking a peek into the working space of Susan Olding, author of “A Different River”!
I write—at least in the sense of typing words on a keyboard or scribbling in a notebook—in a small attic room. I have a proper desk and a fancy ergonomic chair but I never use them. Instead, I curl up with my laptop or notebook on the daybed. This is the view from there on a dark, rainy day last summer—hence the fan, and the lights. I lack a view here (the window overlooks a brick wall and the neighbour’s roof) but except on the very darkest days (like the one this photo was taken) I do have air because we put in a skylight. To the right, there’s a big shelf that you can’t see, filled with poetry books. Otherwise I tend to have anthologies and writing guides of various kinds in this room—stuff I might consult for mentoring or teaching—but at the right hand side of the bed is another shelf piled with books I’m reading now, or want to read, or need to consult for research. Maybe you can also make out my little “shrine” shelves for Virginia Woolf and John Keats, two writers who’ve been “pole stars” as Keats might say.
Notice the cat, Max. He keeps me company and insists that I get up to stretch every now and then. The drawing on the wall is not actually him, though it looks like it—it’s by the artist John Eaton and is on loan from a kind friend.
This room is small and tough to keep neat and organized (especially for someone who continually buys books) yet to me it feels a bit like Sara Crewe’s room in the attic at Miss Minchin’s (after her benefactors have filled it with beautiful things) — it is warm, vivid, a little jewel box.
But the truth is, a lot of the real work of writing gets done outdoors when I am walking. Walking in all weather is how I get the knots out, and it’s often where I get my best ideas. I mostly walk along the lake at Breakwater Park. Every day is the same; every day is different.
We’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look into the writing process – straight from the desks of our contributors! Check out the full series here.
She pulled out a large sheet of paper and stuck it on the wall. Skin on the back of her hand rippled down to her wrist. The cane she used to prop herself up when she walked was leaning against the desk.
The assignment was simple: students had to uncover their cultural heritage. She went around the room one-by-one asking students to declare where their families came from. One country per line, with a check mark for every repetition. England, Wales, Scotland, the countries that occupied the greatest amount of space; a common occurrence across the French immersion classrooms of the burgeoning four- and five-bedroom community. Her eyes drifted to me and I mumbled, “Greece and Bermuda.”
She backed away from the wall, still holding the marker in her hand. Turning to her students, she declared, “I am from Kanata.”
How can she be from Kanata? I wondered. That is not a country. Kanata was a sprawling suburb in the west end of Ottawa undergoing massive development. Many of the homes were still under construction so I knew she was too old to be from there.
Madame Leclerc, a stout woman with a voice that bellowed across the classroom, belonged to a group of people called the Haudenosaunee, which the French renamed the “Iroquois.” They were one of the many peoples who lived in Canada—before it was Canada. She explained that in her language, “Kanata” meant village. Unlike her students, who could trace our ancestors to places outside the country’s borders, she knew only one land.
It was the first time someone explained Canada was not just a place; Canada was also a time. It was impossible to draw a start date, showing when the land began. But the beginning of Canada was clear. It was the year someone from another place decided that is what the land should be called.
She was my first Indigenous teacher, and the first Indigenous person I ever met. Before her, no one said there was a difference between people who were from Canada and people who were from somewhere else. Isolated in the affluent community twenty-five kilometres east of downtown Ottawa, I learned there were two main people in Canada: those who spoke English and those who spoke French. My community was unique, it was one of the few places in Ontario with many people who spoke French.
This was the first year we had a designated class for history. Madame Leclerc chopped up the text like an editor, striving to create the most accurate and interesting story, crossing out verbs in past tense and replacing them with the present tense. Indigenous peoples, she insisted, were not people who once lived, they were people who still existed—even if we did not see them. With the assistance of inserted photocopied pages from books we had never read, she recounted a story.
It was the late nineteenth century and European settlement was soaring. The government was pushing First Nations peoples into designated territory. The government called these areas reserves, land set aside for people who lived before Canada. Then people came, she said, and took their children to pensions. A pension was a school only for Indigenous children. A place where lessons focused on rubbing out Indigenous culture and replacing it with something British or French—something Canadian. That way, the government could turn them into apples: red on the outside, white on the inside. The children were not just taken, they were kidnapped.
Kidnapped to go to school? I thought. Weird. I wanted to ask why people with brown skin were called red. I wanted to ask why First Nations children had to be forced to go to school and why they did not have their own schools. I wanted to ask what was wrong with Indigenous culture, why it needed to be changed. But Madame Leclerc was in the middle of a lesson and was not ready to be interrupted.
She closed the book, loose papers still hanging out of the edges, and laid it on her desk. I started to raise my hand when she walked back to the front of the room. She pointed her index finger to the ceiling like a preacher ready to start a sermon.
Her uncle grew up in a pension. Every time he tried to speak his language, teachers pierced the sides of his tongue. She stuck out her tongue and pressed her fingers against it.
He never spoke his language again.
She looked at the floor, as if in search of something she would not find. Her grandfather had suffered a stroke. Lying on his hospital bed, he started speaking his language again. It was the first time she saw her father cry. Within the walls of a government-sanctioned institution, they had recovered something that was stolen from them.
Because of the treatment Indigenous children suffered at these pensions, Madame Leclerc said, many returned home and could not transition back into their families. Some never returned; others were ignored by their communities. They were angry at their treatment. Some began drinking alcohol to deal with their pain. When they were adults and had children of their own, many copied their school treatment at home. For the first time, she said, children in Indigenous families were beaten. Madame Leclerc described this as a pattern, a pattern of abuse.
During quiet reading time, I was hunched over an open textbook like all the other students. Madame Leclerc approached my seat. Her palm squarely on the desk, time had etched stories into the creases of her sixty-three-year-old skin. She leaned over and ran her finger under the words, Many Indigenous children suffered at these pensions, underlining a meaning not evident. I cocked my left eyebrow and lifted my chin towards her. Her eyes were steady, her eyebrows slightly raised. I looked down at the page; I saw only black letters arranged neatly next to each other.
*
The wall knocked against my elbow each time my arm drifted too far from the centre of the desk. Muscles in my hand ached from gripping the pen too tightly. Once again, I had done something to annoy my grade six teacher and once again found myself with an in-school suspension. It had only been fifteen minutes and I was already tired of completing the worksheet. It was mandatory to fill out a worksheet answering questions about the “infraction” I had committed. In this case, it was defiance: the one word whose dictionary definition I had written so many times I could quote it without looking. Each time I was sent to her, the vice-principal shoved the same worksheet in my hands and escorted me to the alternative learning centre, where all “bad kids” served their in-school suspensions. A student on an in-school suspension was not an active participant at school. I was confined to that room all day, including recesses and lunch hour. I did not have access to any of the teacher’s lessons from that day, so I tried to do what homework I could.
I had started to become familiar with the cubicle in the far corner of the room. The pencil markings I drew on the desk two weeks before were still there. Whenever the teacher demanded I do something without asking the same of other students and I disobeyed, she waltzed to the intercom in our classroom. She spoke loud enough for other students to hear and look up from their work, “I’m sending Miss Wright down to the office.” I placed my pencil on the desk, pushed in the chair, and began the stroll to the front of the school. Looking down at the grey tiles waxed that morning, I focused on my steps to avoid making eye contact with teachers in the classrooms I passed; they all knew where I was going.
Grade six was a bad year; the bullying got worse. I had become accustomed to jokes about my brown skin. “You look like a piece of poo,” a red-headed girl once snapped back during an argument.
I started puberty, and my mother bought me my first bra. My hips grew five inches, but I kept my ten-year-old waist. I had to buy pants that were a size five even though I was a size two, so there was enough space for my butt. The gap at the back of my pants was wide enough to fit a fist between the waistband and the bottom of my spine. It was my mother’s idea to fasten the sides of my pants with safety pins; the pins kept fabric in place and were not damaged by the washing machine.
I was the only Black girl in the class, and my body became the most visible object in the room. It transformed into a touchable museum exhibit, where students explored their curiosities: How many pencils could they slide into my thick curls before I noticed? Why did my hair bounce back when they tugged on it? In gym class, I clenched the muscles in my butt whenever I was standing so that when students threw basketballs at it, they would not have the satisfaction of seeing it jiggle.
The teacher, a round woman with a pudgy face, stayed silent. I preferred her silence to the giggles she sometimes made under her breath. I was a “bad kid” and found few allies. Every time I came back from the alternative learning centre, I had to reintegrate into class. Students watched as I walked to my desk and slid into the chair. Like a prisoner returning at the end of a sentence, they knew where I had been.
One day I was sick and went to the nurse’s office; my brother and I traded strep throat for almost a year until our doctor urged us to use different hand towels and toothpaste. That day, Madame Leclerc came to visit. I was in the last class before she retired and she sometimes visited her former students to say hello. My back hunched forward in the chair, a half-glass of flat ginger ale in my hand, when she walked in. She pulled up a chair, leaned back, and folded her arms. “So, how are things these days?” she said, her lips pursed as if she already knew the answer.
“Fine.”
“Oh really?” She leaned forward so her eyes were directly in front of mine. I scrunched my hands under my chin, my elbows dug into the table. I stared into the ginger ale as the last bubble fizzed. “I hear you have been getting in trouble a lot.”
I bit my bottom lip before I summoned up the courage to respond. “Yes.”
She sighed. I expected her to give me a lecture about how important it was to listen to my teachers. “I know it is not easy. But you cannot learn if you are not in class. You are too smart to waste your time in that room.” She got up from the chair and told me to keep studying hard.
I watched her walk out of the room. Barely taller than I was, her forceful demeanour garnered respect from students and teachers. A strict disciplinarian, she could silence any noisy room with a shout of a single word, “three!” I could not understand why she was not upset.
*
A law that was supposed to change everything. I looked at the cliché in the opening line and was convinced I would bomb the assignment. It had been a few years since the government enacted the Safe Schools Act and my grade ten teacher demanded we learn about it. A very important law, she called it. I read through the opening passages and knew exactly what it was supposed to do: weed out the bad kids and suspend them. Sure, that willmake schools safe, I thought, chuckling to myself. Safe for who?
I had another assignment on my mind: English. The teacher insisted we learn how to formulate an argument and deliver it in front of people. It would help us in our future lives, she said. Twirling her fingers through her long black hair, she instructed us to write a rant.
I sat on my bed with three torn pages out of the yellow notebook where I often wrote my thoughts; “safe schools” could wait. The blank pages sought the companionship of ink from the pen resting on the comforter. What would people think if I did this? But I knew it didn’t matter. I was tired. Of the jokes, the insults, the stupid stereotypes that made no sense. I was angry and I wanted to prod them into anger, too. I grabbed the pen and scratched the topic at the top of the page. The tip forced its way through the paper and onto the book I was using as a writing surface when I underlined the title: racism.
There is no such thing as reverse-racism, my hand scribbled in a fury of barely legible words. I wanted to attack the ridiculous response I often heard when I complained to teachers and friends about unfair treatment. I looked down at the two-page paragraph and scoffed, this will really get them going.
I stood at the front of the classroom, staring at students in the second row. They have no idea what’s about to happen, I thought, a grin plastered across my face. I shifted between the page and my classmates as I spoke each line. My voice grew louder when I got to the part on reverse-racism. A blonde-haired girl in the front row bit into her fingernails and peered at the floor. Perhaps she thought my presentation was payback for not skipping over the word nigger when it was her turn to read To Kill a Mockingbird aloud. When I finished my speech, students looked at each other, not knowing whether it was okay to clap. I walked to my seat, my chin parallel to the floor, and leaned back into the chair. I didn’t look towards the teacher’s desk; her opinion didn’t matter. She told us to write a rant, so I ranted.
We got our results. I got an A and a simple comment: great passion. Apparently, I was good at being angry.
*
I flipped the page, hoping it would give me the right answer. Fewer things were more boring than memorizing how to calculate the standard deviation for data sets. Why did I buy this notebook with such tiny squares? I can’t write this small. I picked up the calculator and pounded through each equation.
“Angela,” the teacher called across the silent classroom, “the principal wants to see you.”
Snickers rose from chairs behind me. I knew exactly what she wanted to discuss, and preferred to continue the math problems. I tossed the textbook, notebook, and calculator in my backpack and headed to the office.
It was only two months until graduation, but she wasn’t going to make this easy. When I walked into her office, Ben was already sitting there. His dirty blonde hair peeked under the red baseball cap he always wore; as though toques weren’t readily available in Canada during the winter months. He looked at me as I sat down, smirking.
The principal swiveled in her chair and leaned in towards us. “Ben tells me you had an argument and said some nasty things to him on the bus this morning,” she said.
I rolled my eyes, still thinking about standard deviations. “Yes, I told him to shut the fuck up.”
Her eyes widened as though she had seen the ghost of her dead mother. I suppose she thought her administrative position protected her from such language.
“Why?”
“Because I’m so tired.” I let out a huge sigh, and my shoulders dropped into the back of the chair. “I don’t care about him.” I folded my arms and sunk my hands under my armpits. “He hangs out with those white supremacists and I know what they say about Black people, they’ve been bothering us all—”
“But I know what it’s like to be discriminated against,” he interjected. “I’m Italian and kids used to make fun of me because I had curly hair.”
The principal stuck her hand in front of his face and he recoiled into his chair. “That is not quite the same thing. It is important to understand that slurs used to insult Black people are not the same as being made fun of because you have curly hair,” she said.
I looked at her and blinked four times before I realized she was serious. It was the first time she had shown any concern for Black students. When a white student who was part of the crew of white supremacists on campus showed up to a dance with SKIN HEAD emblazoned on his shirt, she was unfazed by his drunken threats to go after Black students.
My thoughts filled the void of silence as I remembered every slight from the past year. The many times a white supremacist bumped me while I was reaching into my locker, each time white supremacists used the word “nic-nack,” like we didn’t know it was a stand-in for nigger. The wad of spit that flew out of a white supremacist’s mouth and landed on my friend’s cheek. I closed my eyes to prevent tears from forming. When I opened my eyes, all the frustrations converged on the tip of my tongue and I blurted out, “You don’t know how hard it is to be a minority. We get so little supp—”
“What do you mean? Black people are not minorities,” the principal said. “There are plenty of Black people at this school. The real problem is that you self-segregate yourselves.”
My shoulders fell forward, and I clasped my hands between my thighs. There was so much to say, but it was pointless. I knew the name of every Black student in that high school. I made a list in the fall when I was trying to solicit support for Black History Month. Out of one thousand students, twenty were Black; twenty too many, apparently.
I saw her lips move, but didn’t hear anything. It was time for me to go. The matter was settled; she wasn’t going to discipline me for cursing on a school bus.
I threw my backpack onto my shoulders and walked out of the office. I turned to walk to the classroom, but went outside instead. The breeze brushed against my face and I felt the weight of the textbook on my shoulders. I sat on the ledge; my back couldn’t stay straight and I slouched forward, elbows on my knees. Looking at the ground, I thought about Madame Leclerc. I wondered if she still returned to school to visit even though all her former students were gone. Did she walk through the hallways, remembering the stories that were imprinted into the crinkles in her skin? Did her children ever learn her native language? I looked out at the parking lot, hoping I would see her striding towards the building. I wanted her to sit on the stone ledge next to me. To lean forward with her eyes directly in front of mine and tell me, tell me she understood.
Angela Wright is a writer and performance artist based in Toronto. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in The Brooklyn Quarterly. She also works in politics and her political commentary has appeared in Maclean’s, Toronto Star, CBC Opinion, Montreal Gazette, Torontoist, and Overland Literary Journal. Connect with her on twitter @angewrig
Today we’re sharing Paige Cooper’s Writing Space with you! Paige is the author of “Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan”, which can be found in Issue 144!
Currently I’m exiled from Montreal and tucked up writing a novel at the Banff Centre’s Leighton Colony. This morning a coyote scooted under my boat, the Elsie K., while I was on deck sucking a hangnail. Being here is bananas. I’m writing in a space that writers have been writing in for the same number of years I’ve been alive. It’s shacky and there’s a corkscrew and some pirate eyepatches in the kitchenette. Focus and inspiration have apparently grimed into the wood paneling because shit is going good for me here, so far. To write I need a candle (see Skully illicitly flaming there on top of Chris Kraus), as many books as will fit, and my murderboard note-stack. FYI, Agnes Martin has some choice words about studios: if you let anyone in who isn’t a certified Friend of Art it’s all ruined, so watch it.
We’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look into the writing process – straight from the desks of our contributors! Check out the full series here.
Today in Writing Spaces, we take a peek into the working space of Tanis MacDonald, author of three poems in Issue 144!
This is where it all happens. My work space is what I always wanted it to be: filled with books and light with the sight of greenery outside, and I feel privileged most days to have such room to think and time travel. As reminders that not everything in my workspace is about facilitating my escape into my head, and that I must accommodate the body, I have the posture ball chair without which my real-world back would be in a great deal of real-world pain, and a cat who dominates the desk like she is writing her own coming of age dystopian series.
We’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look into the writing process – straight from the desks of our contributors! Check out the full series here.
Continuing the special #TNQ144 edition of Writing Spaces, we’re taking a peek into the working space of Michelle Syba, author of “End Times”.
I like to write on the couch. I start by reading for 20 minutes, to remind myself why I write, and then the book closes and the laptop opens. Usually the state of absorption carries over, as I go from one world to another. Nearby are tea and chocolate, for caffeine and pleasure, and a notebook to remind myself of some developments in the story.
My writing habitat basically evinces a commitment to pleasure. I don’t see the point of writing creatively if it’s not mostly enjoyable, or at least absorbing when difficult. I trained as an academic, and back then wrote at a desk. Academic writing felt like work, mainly because my brain isn’t wired to generate systematic arguments, but also because of the desk. When I finally gave myself permission to write creatively, I realized that it would need to be fun if I was going to keep doing it. Sitting on a couch making up stories is fun. My space reminds me that I’m lucky to write how I want.
We’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look into the writing process – straight from the desks of our contributors! Check out the full series here.
Today we’re sharing Michelle Kaeser’s Writing Space with you! Michelle is the author of “This is a Love Story,” which can be found in Issue 144!
This is my writing space. It’s never properly tidy. There’s always a bunch of crap on the desk, notably that pile of half-finished crossword puzzles in the corner (I actually prefer the number puzzles—the KENKEN in particular, which never goes unfinished). I like my terrestrial and satellite radios (seen on the bookshelves), because they make long days spent alone at this desk more bearable. I like this large swivel chair, because it makes me feel like a CEO. Most important to me is that this desk faces a wall. Walls are less distracting than windows. Windows make writing impossible.
We’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look into the writing process – straight from the desks of our contributors! Check out the full series here.
on a loop
i hear i am sick of immigrant stories
in a voice that morphs from the voice
of the white man in the fiction workshop
into my voice, but warped
I am sick of immigrant stories,
i am sick of immigrant stories,
i am sick of immigrant stories, i am sick, i am sick, i am sick
the little girl in the story searches
her bruises for meaning
when they are pink,
she looks at her body, tentative.
when they are purple, she looks up
to the sky to match
when the bruises disappear
their body becomes almost unrecognizable,
little scars left from when
they pinched too hard
as a child
+
my mother escapes a country in battle
my mother took a boat
through the mediterranean
my mother spends months
in a small apartment in Cyprus
with siblings, cousins, aunts,
uncles, grandparents, stacked
one over the other
my mother and her family
wait around for something
to change, for safe return
my mother is a teenager
crammed
into a small box
sharing a bed
with four others
my mother took a boat
and a plane
and a plane
and a plane
and landed in Canada
this is my mother’s story, the disruption in my bones.
+
this body makes it’s way
back and forth
across the atlantic ocean,
landing in countries
that are not mine to claim
landing in the basin
of the mediterranean
landing gently, on purpose
i dip my toes in quickly,
water and salt an extension
of my body, but oh so briefly,
the connection severed
when escape feels necessary
ten days visiting opens body wounds
around the stomach, chest, heart
i swoosh words around my mouth
“she” “fat” “woman” “feminine”
bruises inside my cheeks, swollen
i pinch myself
on the plane ride back
look at my body
and remind myself it’s mine
these bruises turn purple
returning home
my mother escaped once
but returns every year
i return every year,
but nowhere feels like escape.
+
land does not define a person,
distance does not separate
home from the land
i mix these ideas into a bag,
shake them out,
spread them on a table,
investigate the ridges and corners
what about land that was left in refuge?
what about land that was stolen?
what about land?
what about land?
what about land?
your home land is yours
despite your distance,
i repeat to myself
over the sounds
of sick of immigrant stories
it drowns the words out
but they linger quietly,
in the background
i repeat your home land
is yours despite your distance
and my limbs release tension,
blood starts circulating,
fresh sea air working its way
through my lungs
i touch the ocean water,
saltwater, cedar trees, gardenia flowers,
and remember small parts of myself
my grandmother mixing spices,
i smell thyme and nutmeg,
smell paprika, coriander, cloves,
cumin, blending into home,
sambousek, kafta, hummus, labneh,
mushaweh cooking on the small barbecue
on her balcony, the yellow salamander
scaling the stone walls.
my grandmother makes a feast,
invites every member
of our extended family, sahten habibi,
she tells me
when i dip pita bread
into a giant bowl of hummus,
swirl the olive oil around
with the bread
until it’s almost all mixed in.
It was
It was a rip and a heart and a sleeve but not in that order.
It was a stage and a fight and an act but not in that order.
Set the stage for the things you want to see happen to you, something like positive thinking.
Leaving is an option Staying is another
The man yelling on the other side of the road screams we have no real options, sees me through Parc Ex darkness, do you want to buy some weed?
E tells me they admire my ability to say yes but it’s because I can’t say no.
I think I’m a happy person until I’m not.
I think I’m a valuable person until I’m not.
The space between my options and yours is the distance between Vancouver and Montreal. This is not a metaphor, this is physical.
We joke about swapping out everyone we don’t like in this city for everyone we love living elsewhere. The list grows longer and longer until we have to stop, heavy.
Montreal is a transitional city.
I’m still here.
The space between my irritation and theirs is the length of my body, 5’7’ and a half.
I hold it inside, a rupture, a case of internal bleeding.
We must keep it contained, safe, locked.
The scene is a recurring one. The sky is darkening, deep purples and soft pinks bruising,
we are bruising, waiting for the marks to heal, soft skin returning to olive.
You imprint a bite mark in my shoulder before you leave.
We pick fruit from the olive trees, send pictures home to friends, ripen in the sun.
My love, says the main figure on the stage
I only miss you when I’m lonely and that isn’t often.
We count the months between Montreal and Lebanon, the distance is ten snowfalls
and hundreds of coffees poured and shrinking.
My cousin tells me a man is a man and a woman is a woman after taking one look at me.
We read books in the sun side by side. You read a passage that makes you frown, but when I ask you what’s wrong, you ignore me, reading.
Two bodies never fall asleep at the same time.
The distance between whiteness and race is the atlantic ocean and the pacific ocean and the gulf of mexico and the mediterranean sea.
The distance between whiteness and browness is my movement.
The distance between my whiteness and my browness is queer.
We are on stage, painting our nails silver glitter. I wave my hands up and down to dry.
You tell me I look like a slow motion hummingbird.
He tells me, people here keep asking me if I’m in process (transition).
He says, I have so many stories to tell you.
I tell him, people always look at me as though I’m in process (transition).
People are looking for my ends, my stops. I fail to tell them I don’t have any.
We spend hours venting. We are always venting.
The closing scene is sitting around the table, trying positive thinking.
We hum, we listen to a tape of Cher, we close our eyes.
The closing scene is you telling me to get into bed, you rolling over,
you looking away then back, you making the first move, you working up the courage to say.
The closing scene is a group of queers bursting into laughter, sides spent.
It was a stitch and a burst and a side but not in that order.
Beside: Ayia Napa
Notes for rethinking:
A Cypriot beach. We are lying on part of the beach, uninhabited by tourists. Your legs, browning in the sun, so covered with dark leg hair you can’t see much of your skin. My legs, out in front of me, beside yours, just as brown. Leg hair more sparse, disappearing at my thighs. We are: hidden, alone and sharing stories that don’t mean much. The smell of the ocean masks your familiar smell, despite the proximity of your body to mine. The sun is at its highest point in the sky as we eat pineapple, the juices leaking onto our salty skin, revealing patches of brown in our salty white layers. Tired, I decide to take a nap while you read.
Scene:
our bodies are perpendicular, our legs crossed.
Scene: (heard in the retelling) disturbed by a tourist wandering from the adjoining beach
He doesn’t say anything. Stares at your legs and swimming trunks. Your naked chest. My naked chest. I’m still napping. He is balking at us while I am undisturbed, dreaming of your body on top of mine but slightly distorted. Our hands, touching, sink into each other and disappearing, melting into one arm on each side, our extended limbs holding you up above me. A snore and he’s reminded where he is. British accents call him back and he glares, not a word, leaves. The sun bakes my legs and I wake up dehydrated. When I try to kiss you, you tell me my breath smells like the breath of an old man. I kiss deeper, holding you tightly as you squirm, your laugh turning into a yell, stop. I pull away, and you pass me water that is slightly too warm and I chug.
Scene:
You are watching people on the other side of the beach while I cry softly. I mostly cry confused, wet snot revealing patches of brown in the salty white layer of skin. We are: alone, visible, and forgetting to clear up the air. I inhale sea salt as I cry, slower, fading. You let me, not looking at my face.
Scene:
Maybe you tell me to stop crying, hugging me.
Scene:
Maybe you forget to explain till later, at home quiet, drinking tea despite the heat.
Scene:
Maybe I’m crying because i’m so dehydrated. Maybe I’ll stop eventually.
Scene:
Maybe the sun has slightly burned my legs and you are spreading aloe onto them.
Eli Tareq Lynch is a poet working in Montreal. They have been published in THEM, the Shade Journal, The Puritan, Carte Blanche, and elsewhere. They were one of the organizers of the Off the Page 2016 literary festival and are currently working on starting a BIPOC reading series in Montreal.
Today in Writing Spaces, we take a peek into the working space of Rhonda Batchelor, author of poems “Camas” and “August Glosa” in Issue 144!
I tend to write first drafts in longhand, often when I’m either out of doors or on a getaway somewhere. I only move to my computer when I’m ready to see how a poem looks “in print.” Usually, more drafts ensue from there. And of course, it’s where I work when sending work to magazines or publishers. My work space is really just a corner of a little room off of my living room in a garden-level (a.k.a semi-basement) suite in a large, 1911 home in the beautiful Victoria seaside neighbourhood of Oak Bay. Apart from two lost years, I’ve lived in this neighbourhood for over three decades. And while this is not the house where I raised my family, it was once on my son’s paper route. Now, a widowed empty-nester, I continue to find comfort and inspiration in the familiar streets that hold so many memories. It’s a rich vein that I have not yet really begun to mine–although I have a project in mind…
The painting on the wall above my desk, by a friend’s father, is a view from Anderson Hill Park, where my poem “Camas” is set. It’s a local hillside, rocky and tucked away above the usual tourist routes. From the very top, one can see the remarkable views in every direction. I like to look at this picture and know that I can walk out of my door and be there in just a few minutes. Behind my desk, just a bit to my right, is a tall bookshelf containing some of my favourite fiction; and to my right, in a little alcove, is a daybed suitable for afternoon scribbling, or reading–or naps. My cat is often curled up there. All in all, it’s a cozy space and I am lucky to be here.
We’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look into the writing process – straight from the desks of our contributors! Check out the full series here.
“You don’t know where the line is but you know when you’ve crossed it.”
A quote from a conversation I had recently with writer Wayne Grady. Wayne was in the Waterloo Region for three days to celebrate his first book of fiction, Emancipation Day. This book had been selected by the local One Book, One Community committee for everyone in the region to read and discuss.
In preparation for our conversation I researched Wayne’s bibliography, and I quickly learned that Wayne’s past books were Québecois to English translations as well as nonfiction with a focus on writing about the natural world. But well into adulthood he discovered a startling piece of his personal history: he had black family heritage. This detail had been kept from him throughout his life and he now had much to think about in terms of what this meant.
Wayne started to approach this subject through the channel he knew best, nonfiction. He researched, thought and wrote—and he wrote and he wrote. He was creating a massive tome but at one point in the process he realized he had crossed some invisible line in his writing. He was no longer writing nonfiction; his writing had morphed into fiction and the start of a novel. Being new to the fiction world he sought advice. One of the first pieces of advice was to keep his first novel “contained.” He needed to trim down his ideas of following a family over many, many years and generations and zero in on a shorter time period. He sought more feedback from trusted sources and was told his drafts were not yet a novel.
He then shared the advice that set him on the path to his end product: a) make the key relationship between father and son, not husband and wife; b) forgive the father and make him more likeable; c) develop the story of the father. This advice was specific and clear and gave Wayne the structure he needed to successfully complete his first novel. The clarity of what he had to do came rushing out and he wrote his final draft in about a month and a half. Total project time, eighteen years.
I asked Wayne if we could delve deeper into his extensive writing experiences so they could be shared with our TNQ community of readers and writers. He was generous in his responses.
When Wayne was editor of Harrowsmith he said he wanted “to bring readers into his experience” by asking “why to”, not “how to.” His ambition was to make our planet a better place by promoting care for our environment through his nature writing. He thought that by helping his readers better understand the natural world, they would naturally care more. This was his subtle form of activism as an artist and extended into his later nonfiction books covering a wide variety of topics such as the Great Lakes, vultures, and coyotes.
Regarding his work as a translator, Wayne told me he lived in Québec and learned Québecois on the street. This prepared him well to translate works by Québec writers into English since he needed to convey ideas and meanings, not merely one-to-one words. He had a similar goal in his translation work as for his nonfiction work: to bring readers into an experience, this time Québec culture and ideas. Wayne has been very successful in achieving this goal and won the Governor General’s Award for Translation in 1989.
We had one other area of conversation that reflected on a reading Wayne gave in Waterloo Region a few years ago. Wayne was sent a piece of music by the conductor of the K-W Symphony, Edwin Outwater. He was asked to write a short piece that was inspired by this music. (I couldn’t help but think later that writing in response to any piece of music would be a great way to practice your writing chops or, perhaps, break through a writer’s block.) He told me that this is what it must feel like to write poetry, although he confided that he’s not a poet. His imagination presented a woman alone in a dark house circa 1940’s and a mood of fear. He then fleshed out his imagination to share with the audience as the symphony played the music behind him.
Wayne had once again taken his readers into his experience and we were all the better for the sharing.
