Natalia Zdaniuk’s Writing Space

I write well on the plane. There are the practical reasons, ones that I’ve seen other writers point out: the benefit of few distractions, the discomfort of the narrow chair keeping you awake, the potential inspiration from unknown passengers. But for me there is also a specific emotional experience that comes from the liminality of the plane — the state of being in-between two places, momentarily nowhere so as to get somewhere. I find this gives space for a particular reflection and force of writing. 

As a child I spent my summers in Poland and lived there for a year when I was four, developing a strong attachment to the place and people that cared for me there. As such, I found, and continue to find, myself living two very different lives: one as a settler on Turtle Island, within and complicit in the project of Canada, where I am shaped by my mother’s chosen family and queer community; the other, in Poland, a land that holds the long history of the family my mother and I were born into. 

Like many other immigrants, I am often torn between these two places, never feeling a full sense of belonging in either. On the plane, however, there is a temporary suspension of this dichotomy. The flight attendants speak English and Polish interchangeably and there isn’t a clear sense of which language comes first. I am still full of the place I have left while becoming newly aware of the place I’m going, all the while having a particular distance from both. It’s a rare moment of cohesion that is inevitably lost once my feet touch solid ground and I immerse myself in the place I’ve landed. 

I first drafted the story “It Freed You, Didn’t It?” (for the Scatterings Series, Issue 157), a few years ago on the plane, returning from my most recent visit to Poland. I remember trying to turn off the little T.V. screen in front of me, but it would not go off completely. Instead it showed a map of where we were in our journey, the pixilated plane right in the centre of the electric blue ocean. As I wrote about my mother in Canada and my aunt in Poland, and the very different trajectories of their lives, I felt a certain significance in knowing that I was currently at the midpoint between them. I wrote steadily from this place, looking up occasionally at the screen to watch my own trajectory.