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What is Heather Paul Reading?

My reading life is typical of the rest of my life:  always a lot going on.  I usually have three to four books on the go, one of which will be an audiobook. Often the audiobooks will be nonfiction, usually in the realm of health and wellness, food and drink.  Recent non-fiction reads (approximately two per month) have included Gabor Mate’s, When the Body Says No, and Anodea Judith’s, Eastern Body, Western Mind. As I am also a yoga teacher, I find the connection between the mind, body, and spirit, inspiring and fascinating; and, I am able to enjoy learning while performing mundane adulting or exercising.  

In terms of actual reading, like fiction on paper, I always have several books scattered throughout the house.  As I like to say:  one for fun; one for challenge; and one for book club.  Right now, my fun read is Judy Blume’s, In the Unlikely Event.  I selected this title because I had never read any of her adult novels, but one of my most memorable Christmases as a child was receiving a box set of Judy Blume books which I tore through, read in about a week, and proceeded to read over and over again.  I still remember the trial scene in Blubber, Shelia the Great’s swim test, Deenie’s scoliosis brace, and have enjoyed rereading the Fudge books to my kids, so, I thought I’d give it a go.  Despite the subject matter, three planes crashed during one year in 1950’s Elizabethtown New Jersey (based on real life events), it’s an enjoyable read.  It isn’t complicated, it doesn’t require deep pondering, and has some interesting insights into life and social mores of the 1950’s which I enjoyed and was able to read quite quickly. I won’t say I loved it, but it was a pleasure to read. 

I’m also just about finished my challenging book which seems to be taking forever:  the 2001 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon.  I had heard of, though never read, anything by Chabon.  When I was reading a collection of Nora Ephron’s essays that I picked up at Value Village, she waxed poetic about the power of fiction to escape one’s life citing Kavalier and Clay as powerful example of a quintessential New York adventure story. Not going to lie, it’s a tough, though thoroughly enjoyable read.  Chabon blends historical facts and figures, Jewish mythology and folklore, with fiction to create the tale of two Jewish comic book creating cousins before, during and after, WWII.  Overall, he plays thematically with the idea of escape:  from tyranny and the confines of social and familial expectations ultimately leading to personal liberation.  My favorite thing about the novel is the comic book references. 

Next on deck for me is the book club read which this month is, How to Pronounce Knife, by Souvankham Thammavongsa. I’m just about to crack the spine and begin. What a great feeling!

 

Heather Paul has worked as an art teacher, a canoe trip leader, a yoga instructor, at a men’s prison and a women’s shelter. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications. She currently lives with her partner, children, and dogs in Ontario.

Photo courtesy of Andres Urena 

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Finding the Form with Margaret Nowaczyk

When Pamela Mulloy invited me to contribute to the Day Jobs column, I felt honored to be asked, rapidly followed by totally panicked. How to describe coherently and literarily what I have been doing for quarter of a century? 

Then I remembered an essay that I had been writing for almost five years.

Its first iteration was written in 2016, for a CNF course in my MFA program, but the seed for this story lay in my mind for few years before that. The realization that geneticists go through stages of professional life dawned on me when I was seeing the patient described as Justin in the essay — that watershed moment in my examining room when I realized that diagnosing patients was not the only thing that I was providing to my patients.

That idea got further traction when I mentioned it to the then editor of the American Journal of Medical Genetics, Dr. John Carey, over a plate of nachos and guacamole in a dive-ish Tex-Mex restaurant in Salt Lake City in 2011. He readily agreed that the concept of a natural history of disease would be an apt analogy for a physician’s professional trajectory, especially since the conceit of natural history of disease came from those written for pathology textbooks and was also used in genetics to describe the progression of genetic syndromes. He asked me to write it for his journal and published it. That article was the great-grandmother of the essay published in The New Quarterly this winter.

But in 2016, my MFA classmates told me that there were too many “things pushed into the story” but that it would make a great start for a memoir that they would all love to read (!). I kept rewriting it, always maintaining the conceit of the natural history. For a long time, I didn’t realize that half of that essay dealt with my mental health issues which were not part of the natural history of a clinical geneticist but of this particular clinical geneticist. Two years ago, I wanted to submit the essay to a memoir contest with a 4000-word limit and my essay was three thousand words too long. I edited out all of the mental health references et voilà! — I had what I had always wanted: a clinical — meaning “detached and dispassionate, like a medical report” — description of the stages of my professional life. That was the conceit, except, of course, it wasn’t cold and dispassionate, I couldn’t be that when writing about my life. 

That is the beauty of and irony inherent in the hermit crab essay: an essay that takes the form of something un-essay-like and subverts it into a personal account. “This kind of essay appropriates other forms as outer covering to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly, it deals with material that is exposed and tender and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.” Using the form of a pathology textbook entry on the natural history of disease converted my fraught, fragmented story into eloquence and a coherent — I hope — narrative.

References:
American Journal of Medical Genetics, 2012, Part A 170A:2591–2593
Forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn, fall 2021
Oxford Dictionary of English, online
“Tell it Slant” by Barbara Miller and Susanne Paola, McGraw-Hill, 2012

Margaret Nowaczyk is a pediatrician-geneticist and an award-winning short form writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. Her memoir about life in the medical profession will be published by Wolsak & Wynn in 2021.

Photo courtesy of Martha Dominguez de Gouveia 

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What is Kirsteen MacLeod Reading?

My new book, In Praise of Retreat, will be out at the end of March—so I’ve recently transitioned to ‘having written.’ As a result I’ve been in ‘kid in a candy store’ mode, deliriously reading works not related to my own book for the first time in ages, in all genres.

I just finished reading Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, which won the 2020 Booker Prize for fiction. The novel intrigued me as it is set in my hometown, Glasgow, and I’d been blown away by Stuart’s short story, “The Englishman” in the New Yorker. What a debut: the book is lyrical, political and resolutely Scottish. I found it heart-breaking, based on Stuart’s traumatic experiences as a gay boy growing up in with an alcoholic mother in the city’s rough tenements. 

Also on my pile? I’ve been bingeing on all manner of poetry: Indigo by Ellen Bass, The New Testament by the awe-inspiring Jericho Brown, Laurie Graham’s brave, beautiful Settler Education, Bronwen Wallace’s Keep That Candle Burning Bright, which a friend gave me for my birthday. 

I was gifted a subscription to the knife/fork/book poetry dispensary, which I highly recommend. January’s selection was Word Problems by Ian Williams, Phil Hall’s latest book, Toward a Blacker Arbour, and a delightful white chapbook with orange bear claw scratches, Ballad of Bernie ‘Bear’ Roy by Cory Lavender. I have also, finally, opened a box of 50 poetry books that I ordered last year from Brick and started reading. As well I just re-read The Outer Wards by the brilliant Sadiqa de Meijer.

And essays. I am currently starting de Meijer’s new book of essays, alphabet/alphabet, a memoir of a first language. I re-read John Berger’s Confabulations, beautiful meditations I return to often. I have also pre-ordered essayist Susan Olding’s forthcoming book, Big Reader—will somehow have to wait until May for that!

Reading is one of the best freedoms I know. During this pandemic, books, along with nature walks and yoga, continue to be my liberation, and solace.  

Kirsteen MacLeod is a writer and yoga teacher. She is the author of two books, In Praise of Retreat (memoir/nonfiction) and The Animal Game (short stories, 2016). Her poetry and prose has appeared in many journals and anthologies, and her work has been a finalist for prizes that include the CBC Literary Award. Kirsteen divides her time between the lakeside city of Kingston, Ontario, and a small riverside cabin in the north woods. 

Cover photo courtesy of Tim Wildsmith 

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Finding the Form with Nicole Baute

When I was seven or eight years old, I was unreasonably worried about losing one of my parents. Instead of sleeping I would lie awake at night trying to imagine my life without them. It was particularly bad on the rare occasion they went out for dinner and left us with a babysitter. I remember waiting from my bed in the dark for the sounds of their safe return: the front door opening, their voices in the hall.

Later my worries shifted to the man I would eventually marry. Whenever he flew for work, which in a pre-Covid world was often, I struggled to focus until I received a text saying he’d arrived safely. “Landed!”

I Feel Better When You’re Here is an attempt to animate and make sense of some of these anxieties. The story began as a novel draft in which I imagined what it would be like to lose the person you love over and over again. Each morning my protagonist would wake up grieving only to discover her husband was not dead after all. Each time she would have a single day with him before losing him again. Writing this out now it sounds like the plot of a bad movie, which is probably why the story became truncated, focused on one episode of loss and inexplicable resurrection.

I wrote the first draft at an artists’ residency in Spain, about an hour’s drive from Barcelona. The residency was based in a rambling old Catalonian farmhouse with loose floor tiles and haphazard furniture. The residency staff were all on vacation and the other residents never seemed to sleep. There was a sense of magic and mystery in the halls, and this percolated into my writing as I thought about another place that had always filled me with a sense of wonder—a provincial park in southwestern Ontario where my family owns a cottage. The park in my story is loosely based on this park, home to private cottages built mostly before the 1950s. My husband and I were living in India at the time and the distance from home allowed me to imagine the park in stark relief, with heightened nostalgia for its history and reverence for the physical beauty of the landscape.

“Instead of sleeping I would lie awake at night trying to imagine my life without them. It was particularly bad on the rare occasion they went out for dinner and left us with a babysitter. I remember waiting from my bed in the dark for the sounds of their safe return: the front door opening, their voices in the hall.”

Our life in India also influenced my work in subtle yet foundational ways. We’d moved to Delhi for my husband’s job as a journalist. I’d spent my first year there trying to write fiction set in the sprawling Indian city only to find this was impossible. It was a complicated place marred by a rigid caste system, intensifying Hindu nationalism and unbelievable air pollution, and as an outsider there was little I felt comfortable saying about it. At some point I started writing prose poems—simple nonfiction observations of daily life. Prose poetry allowed me to process my experience in India without the confines of plot or the artifice of character, and this story—although not about India—is in part an outcropping of a shift in style born from that time. Influenced by writers like Lidia Yuknavitch and Brian Doyle I began writing prose with a new intensity. In India I felt breathless and existential so I suppose it’s only appropriate that I fell into a style that mirrored this state of mind. 

At the same time my writing began to arch more deeply towards creative non-fiction and autofiction; the characters and settings of I Feel Better When You’re Here are closely derived from real life (even the cat shares traits with mine!).

It’s fascinating to look back on the process of writing this story as my life has changed dramatically since. We moved to Hong Kong the summer of 2019 and in late December the pandemic began next door in mainland China. The following September I had a baby after years of trying, quelling some of the loneliness that had crept into my writing. Over the past few months we have spent an extraordinary amount of time marvelling over her coos and smiles.

Like any work of art, I Feel Better When You’re Here was the product of a specific set of circumstances that will never again be. Now I long for the day when I can bring my daughter home to Canada to play on the beach at the family cottage and snuggle her grandparents, who remain healthy and well, if desperate to meet her.

Nicole Baute is a Canadian writer living in Hong Kong. Her short stories have appeared in The Forge, Prairie Fire, carte blanche and Wigleaf, and in 2018 she won the Pinch Literary Prize for Fiction.

Cover photo courtesy of Shubham Shrivastava 

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Finding the Form with Ian LeTourneau

Birds occasionally take centre stage in my poems and many fly through in minor roles, on their way, perhaps, to find better habitat elsewhere (in other poets’ poems?). Starlings, chickadees, pine siskins have been my subjects; crows, pileated woodpeckers, red winged blackbirds, to name just a few, have flapped or soared through my poems. 

I find birds endlessly fascinating. So when I read a CBC New Brunswick article about chimney swifts (“Nature’s air show awes nightly crowds below a Fredericton chimney,” June 11, 2018) after hearing a feature on the local morning show, I knew I wanted to try to write a poem. And I made a start on June 12, typing a few initial thoughts. Not a very good start. Embarrassing, really. But I guess we have to push through the embarrassing to get somewhere hopefully not embarrassing (or in other words, bonus embarrassing lines and phrases to come below!).

The idea of a mass of birds flying into a chimney struck me as a potent image of an industrial reversal. And for some reason I thought of Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, which I must have spent some time leafing through and then wrote the quotation down. The “touch of the hat” of the Amis quotation, to me, strikes me now as a fine gesture from the birds. 

In my next drafts I started to try to find some industrial language that would set up the reversal, which is clear from “shipping lane,” “teeth,” and “smoke that belched.” 

Screen Shot 2021-02-26 at 4.31.54 PM

Ten days later, I came back to the poem, and it started to become a bit more cohesive. You can see below that I may have found the progress frustrating as I was clearly noodling around by playing with the font of the title. Also, the image “luggage carousel of air currents” which appears in the next few drafts was eventually pilfered and subsumed into another poem.

At this point, I didn’t come back to the poem until 4 months later at which point I added some more detail that I must have been hoping to incorporate into the poem. And you can see some of the eventual shape coalescing.

Then 6 months later I took another run at the poem. I had recently been to the AGO on a trip to Toronto and saw an exhibition of paintings that documented the industrial revolution so I had the idea – which never stuck – to begin with the dramatic imagery of Maximilien Luce’s “Steelworks,” which was one of the more striking paintings I saw. (Sidenote: I also happily attended my first Blue Jays (more birds!) game with Daniel Renton and Daniel Tysdal.)

Then the very next day, perhaps sensing that the poem needed focus, I wrote the following in my notebook:

When I took up the poem again, a month later, while I was staying for a week at the Elizabeth Bishop house for a writing retreat, the next two images show a few printouts of some progress, as the file remained open on my computer for a few days.  By the end of May 22, the poem was in its final form (as printed in TNQ).

As for the actual form — a blank verse sonnet: I am obsessed with sonnets. Robert Lowell’s sonnets (History) are particular touchstones that I re-read every couple of years. So I basically start every poem as if it’s going to be a sonnet. It seems like a natural limit: I usually say what I want to or need to say in 14 lines or so. It’s a convenient unit of thought. (I also obsessively date every piece of paper I write on… ever since I read somewhere that TS Eliot admonished a younger poet for not doing so.)

Ian LeTourneau is the author of two chapbooks, Defining Range (Gaspereau) and Core Sample (Frog Hollow), and the full-length collection Terminal Moraine (Thistledown). He lives in Fredericton, NB.

Photo courtesy of Josi Ribeiro

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Heather Paul’s Writing Space

For those of you who haven’t studied women’s literature, Virginia Woolf wrote a book called a Room of One’s Own, the premise of which noted that women are largely absent from literary cannons because they were not deemed worthy of education and were usually stuck cooking, cleaning, knitting or caring for someone instead of being able to contribute to culture at large.

 She posits, what would happen if Shakespeare had a sister?  Would we be reading her plays? Nope.  She’d be too busy darning socks.  You get the picture.  The other thing this seminal woman’s manifesto suggests is that in order to create, one must have a space of her own.  Ideally, of course, a room.  Many of us may never have the privilege of claiming such a place.  

I am fortunate to have been able to carve a space for myself in a windowless storage closet in the basement, which, I might add, I am continually reminded by three teenaged boys that it would make an excellent “gaming room.”  Fat chance.   This is my place of reverence and centring.  A place to focus, to meditate, to honour myself and claim a space for my creative offerings. I shut the door and write or make art in a place that is just for me. A place where I can leave all my research and writing papers all over the desk and they will be exactly where I left them.

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Heather Paul has worked as an art teacher, a canoe trip leader, a yoga instructor, at a men’s prison and a women’s shelter. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous publications. She currently lives with her partner, children, and dogs in Ontario.

Photos courtesy of Annie Spratt 

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Angeline Schellenberg’s Writing Space

My requirements for a productive writing space are simple: sunshine, silence, and a dog.

In summer, I write outdoors whenever possible. This past summer, our neighbour from across the street built us a patio on the east side of our house under our apple trees. He took his time, partly because he’s a perfectionist, and partly because he’s lived alone since his wife—my dear friend Michelle—died; while he worked, he was never without food and company.

I’ve arranged the space with an old church pew by the table for when I’m religiously scribbling/typing and a swing at one end for reading and naps. My dog Lily dozes in a sunny patch on the lawn. 

The only sounds are the birds at the feeder, the wind in the leaves, and the occasional banjo solo from the open window next door.

Lovely as the patio is, since it is situated in Winnipeg, Canada, I need another space to write from October to May. Thankfully, the prairie sun follows me indoors.

For years, I’ve written in the corner of the living room sectional, in front of the picture window. The room is open to the front entrance, kitchen, and hallway, and features my daughter’s upright piano. Sunshine: check. Dog: check. Silence: sometimes. 

This winter, we moved our daughter to a newly finished, bigger bedroom in the basement, and turned her old room into an office. We’d wanted a separate workspace for a while, but with me being laid off at the end of 2019, and my husband and son zooming in to work or university from home due to COVID, the need became more pressing. 

For a small room, it fits a lot of stuff: our old kitchen table works as a writing desk, my Oma’s old recliner is perfect for reading or napping, shelves and baskets hold my books and art supplies (pottery glazes; napkins and embroidery floss for journal making; newspapers for collaging). There is even room on the floor for a half-completed puzzle.

The walls are decorated with framed sunsets and children from my husband’s photography shows, my daughter’s acrylic paintings, and my mom’s cross-stitch of a red barn which I nabbed from my parents’ house when they left the farm. 

Scattered around the room are reminders of my little brother Tim who died of liver cancer this past November: a framed sympathy card of a chickadee, a key my college roommate sent me because Tim collected keys (1,800 of them!), a wooden bear Tim made in shops class, the pottery tractor I made for his last birthday. I keep them here to protect them from the splatter and bustle of the rest of the house. They give the room weight.

The sun streams in through the window, lifting my mood. The only sounds interrupting the words in my head are my son’s giggles through the wall. And there’s my Lily: asleep in front of the electric fireplace.

Angeline Schellenberg’s full-length debut about raising children on the autism spectrum, Tell Them It Was Mozart (Brick Books, 2016), won three Manitoba Book Awards and was a finalist for a ReLit Award for Poetry. In 2019, she launched poetry chapbooks with Kalamalka, JackPine, and Dancing Girl Presses, and received nominations for The Pushcart Prize and Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year. The host of Speaking Crow, Winnipeg’s longest-running poetry open mic, Angeline has read at literary events across Canada. Her latest book, Fields of Light and Stone (University of Alberta Press, 2020), is a series of elegies for her Mennonite grandparents. When she’s not writing, Angeline enjoys creating pottery, talking to dogs, and eating other people’s baking.

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Photos courtesy of Sigmund

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Finding the Form with Mary-Lynn Murphy

I wasn’t working on a specific project at the time I wrote “Recalculating” and had no ideas in mind, so I approached the page with a familiar mixture of anticipation and hopelessness. I often begin by putting something—anything—on the page, sometimes just what I see out the window. Something to get the pen moving. The first line of writing that day was this: “There are things you want to outlive. Others you don’t.” I have no idea what that was all about, but what I wrote next began the ramblings that turned into “Recalculating.” That’s often how things go.

Not much of what I write is planned in advance; I just follow where the pen takes me. The “silent type” with the chainsaw at the beginning of this story had shown up before in writing that didn’t lead anywhere; I didn’t know what to do with him. This time, I found his opposite, and that ended up giving shape to the piece. The second-person point of view was there from the beginning of this effort; it seemed to drive the writing in a way. 

I’m drawn to work by writers like Amy Hempel, whose stories are often very short and don’t always follow “the rules” about structure—at least not that I can see. So I find myself wondering, what is a story? Even when I reached what seemed to be the end of this piece after several revisions, I had no idea whether it was a story. 

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I’m grateful to be a member of a small writing group whose focus is critiquing each other’s work. I submitted “Recalculating” to the group one time when I had little else to offer. After making a few good editing suggestions, they told me to submit it somewhere as a piece of flash fiction. And now it’s in TNQ; I guess it is a story after all.

Mary-Lynn Murphy’s poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, Event, The Fiddlehead, FreeFall, Grain and Dandelion. She was a prize winner in TNQ’s 2012 Occasional Verse contest. Her novel, Finding Grace, was published by Scrivener Press in 2013. She lives in Northern Ontario, near Superior’s eastern shore.

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Cover image by https://writix.co.uk/

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Finding the Form with Tom Wayman

I first met Giorgio, who eventually served as Toronto’s poet laureate between 2004 and 2009, when I went to the University of Windsor to be their writer-in-residence 1975-76. My poetry collection Money and Rain, published by Macmillan of Canada in 1975, had included poems about an eight-month stint working in Burnaby, B.C. as a factory assemblyman for Canadian Kenworth. The UWindsor selection committee felt that my writing about building trucks was a good match for the city, given Windsor’s auto plants integrated with Ford and Chrysler production on both side of the Detroit River.

I can’t remember whether I was introduced to Giorgio through the Italo-Canadian poets then active in Winsor, Mary di Michele and Len Gaspirini, or whether I met him through mutual friends in the Toronto literary scene. I was frequently in Toronto between 1975 and 1996, in part because my parents lived there and in part because during that era Toronto really was the literary centre of the country—different than today, when a proliferation of literary foci across the Dominion has supplanted the former binary paradigm of centre/hinterlands, of national/regional.

However we met, Giorgio and I became friends. I admired not only his poetry, but also his determination not to be Peter George—something new in Canada at that time, when immigrants traditionally Anglicized at least their first names. 

In the 1970s, as a result of post-World War II immigration, the population of Toronto had become about one-quarter Italian or of Italian descent—a transformative change for a place known previously for Anglican and Presbyterian rectitude: Toronto the Good. And Giorgio played a vital role in achieving importance in Canadian Literature for the writers in English active among the relative newcomers. In 1978 he put together the first anthology of Italo-Canadian poets writing in English that I was aware of, Roman Candles.

Unlike the current advocates for writing by various racial and sexual micro-minorities, Giorgio in presenting his seventeen authors had confidence in the accomplishment of the poems. He needed neither to attack mainstream CanLit (literary production seen as a zero-sum activity) nor blather about “underrepresentation” (which author can say with a straight face that she or he truly represents his or her community?). Instead, Giorgio states in his Preface, concerning the material he had collected:

The Italo-Canadian experience expressed by these contributors . . . ranges from poems that directly speak from a displaced sensibility to poems that are not conscious of any such dilemma. . . . As poems should be, they are not so much a resolve as they are a discovery. They map out a journey towards a new citizenship, one that has little to do with anti-Americanism or the convenience of a melting-pot.

As a person, Giorgio was easy to feel affection toward. He had a huge heart toward his friends, and a deep seriousness about life, literature, and ideas. His solemn approach regarding the latter sometimes verged on the ridiculous, although he took the ribbing he received for such behavior with an unfailing sense of humor. Good talk and Italian coffee—long before the flooding of North America by corporate espresso—were two things he enjoyed, based on his thoroughgoing appreciation of the sensuous and his delight in people.

The elegy in TNQ was not the first poem I wrote for him. In my 1986 collection, The Face of Jack Munro, published by Harbour, I have a poem called “December Letter to Pier Giorgio Di Cicco in Toronto.” In it I suggest that, since he and I both have large Mediterranean noses, we should decamp to the sub-tropical sun of southern California where 

in the end
we will marry women
who never head of Canada, and have children
who never heard of snow.

Instead of taking my advice, Giorgio was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1993. He wrote stunning poems about the tougher aspects of that occupation—how to act honestly in conducting a funeral for a family that in a tragic accident has lost their children. And as Toronto poet laureate and afterwards he thought hard and wrote passionately and insightfully about the purpose of a city (I skim the surface of some of his ideas in my elegy). 

His sudden death a few days before Christmas in 2019 was a shock to me. I was used to middle-of-the-night phone messages from him where I live in B.C.—being a priest never, as far as I could see, changed Giorgio’s proclivity toward rising around noon and going to bed in the early morning. Plus I’m not sure he ever grasped the concept of time zones. But every message he left me ended with an earnest, “God bless you, Tom. God bless you”. Vintage Giorgio: wishing the best for a friend, even though he knew I’m about as religious as a compressed air impact wrench.

When I wanted to write an elegy for him, tone was all-important. I wanted to capture his mix of self-confidence, engagement with ideas, respect and regard for others, and a refusal to be cowed by precedent or authority (he had various run-ins with the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but stood his ground: “The bishop knows,” he confided in me once, “it’ll be a long time until Toronto has another Catholic priest as poet laureate”). One model for me was the elegy by American spoken word poet Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931) for the founder of the Salvation Army. Lindsay’s poem expresses appreciation of William Booth’s sincere if somewhat simplistic Christian faith, and of his accomplishment in founding a popular new religious movement, while gently mocking the silliness of trying to militarize a religion supposedly based on love.

I knew my poem had to be conversational in structure, given how important conversation was to Giorgio. A rigid stanzaic structure was out, because Giorgio was nothing if not iconoclastic, with a somewhat non-conformist lifestyle even as a priest. And I knew any Heaven for Giorgio would have to offer excellent coffee. Plus, given the Church’s present difficulties with past behavior by some of its representatives, I couldn’t see God‘s Son showing up, as in Lindsay’s elegy, to welcome even the most accomplished ministers—like Giorgio—before they could be properly vetted. Head Office would instead send a functionary, I reasoned. And given the traditional narrow-mindedness of functionaries compared to Giorgio’s broad range of interest in human beings and their communities, I had the plot of the poem.

Tom Wayman was named in 2015 a Vancouver Literary Landmark, with a plaque on the city’s Commercial Dr. commemorating his championing of people writing for themselves about their employment. His most recent collections of poems include Helpless Angels (Thistledown, 2017), shortlisted for the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, and Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back: Poems for a Dark Time (Harbour, 2020), which appeared just before the pandemic lockdown, despite the book’s subtitle. In December 2020, North Vancouver’s Alfred Gustav Press published a chapbook of his, The House Dreaming in the Snow. He lives in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern B.C.

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Photos courtesy of Daniele Levis Pelusi 

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What is Melody Goetz Reading?

First to say that my introverted self has found the seclusion required of this pandemic, for the most part, as “permission” to deepen the contemplative, creative path that calls.  Still, there is the awareness of many for whom this is not so, and for whom much assails, and so sorrow and concern also sits with me in my chair.  

Surely, if I were a medical professional, I would give my heart to that work, or to any other external ‘helps’ that would match my skills.  And I do what I can with what I have.  Still, I’m in my 60’s, and a writer and painter; the interior life and its expressions seem my primary ‘skill’.  I remember Nadine Gordimer saying once, when interviewed during South Africa’s most harrowing season of apartheid, “In the end, the best thing a writer can do for her country is to write as well as she can.”   I find a focus on creative vocational work as an act of solidarity and love for the world as a helpful approach – it keeps me occupied in a life-giving way, and I can name it as a kind of meaningful engagement.  Even though its ‘effects’ may be less visible than other work.  As I look at my bookshelves, the chosen distilled collection of favourites, I am aware of how helpful and sustaining – even orienting – these books have been.  Even though I’ve not met their authors, they have been deeply good company, at times even a kind of ballast. And so, their solitary work has a shared life -who could predict it?

I am loving “Taken on Trust“, a book by Terry Waite – maybe my 4th time to read it, I dunno.  It’s amazing to me.  He was envoy to the Archbishop of Canterbury back in the 80’s, was taken a hostage for 5 years – 4 years of which, he was kept in a windowless room chained to the wall.  During that time, he resolved to stay sane and to find meaning by revisiting his life reflectively – after all he had lots of time – with a view to writing a book.  No pen or paper, he just processed for a set time each day, and held it in memory.  When he was released, he took a year or so – I think – to ‘decant’ that story, weaving it in with his experience as a captive.  He writes about a whole different kind of solitude, and finds life within it.  I value the unflinching searchlight of “Taken on Trust“, and reading it again during the pandemic has offered an additional layer of richness.  His long toil has unearthed a singular writing – remarkable really, how a book about solitude can be such good company. 

Another book I’ve re-read is Marilynne Robinson’s “Lila”.  I can’t possibly encompass it in words; she is a brilliant writer, and deeply thoughtful human.  Suffice it to say, among the many threads the book weaves together, it’s about two people of disparate backgrounds and belief systems, who are drawn by love to make a life together.  Their raw, respectful, broken, sincere journey fills the heart.  The first time I read it, the words arose in me, unbidden, “I want to be buried with this book.”  Goodness!  I’d never thought of that sort of thing before.  But my experience of it was so… hmmm… fulsome, and utter.  And these days, to witness a respectful albeit difficult exchange between different ‘takes’ on life is sheer gift.  It’s like a window being cleaned.  And the view it offers is hopefulness.

Born in Saskatchewan, Melody Goetz currently lives in BC. Her short stories have been shortlisted twice in the CBC Literary Competition, and she is the author of a poetry chapbook as well as a book of stories garnered from a professional career in corporate management in an eldercare community. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. She is also a practicing visual artist.

Photos courtesy of Steve Johnson 

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