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Light a candle tonight

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A few years back, I wrote a poem in response to a 2006 CBC Radio Ideas show about Dalits or untouchables. (See Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Mother Tongue, 2008).

Mung Beans   (for Bujji Govinda)

A widow, she hitched a ride home from the market.
A fruit seller.
Dalit.
Untouchable.
Two men in the cab of a truck. An old man on the bench in the back,
so she climbed in.

I would kill myself, she says, but what about my children?

The truck pulled over under a tree.
The driver and his companion told the other man to leave.
She knew then, she says, and she was afraid.
They spread her out on the hard bench
and did things to her for maybe an hour.

All rapes are the same, really, and each one is its own:
each man’s whiskers a different shade of hard
each man’s prick with its own insistent voice. One man’s knees
got sore and so they took her outside to the soft ground under the tree.
When they ran out of things to do they looked for other utensils.
That’s when she ran.

I pour mung beans into a jar and dust catches in the back of my throat.
I rinse the beans and pour the water down the drain
to find its way back outside into the ground.
The beans are not exactly round.
On one side there’s an umbilical scar: the hilum.
Just below its white indentation,
the radicle. This is the nub of the first root.
Nosing its way toward moisture, it splits the dark skin.

Washed and washed and washed again,
the bean meat swells. We eat the sprouts: the pale root,
the first leaves’ little flapping wings, and the dust from Bujji Govinda’s feet
running through the tangled vines. Mung beans, she says.
They tripped her and she fell.

She is a loose woman, the policemen say, to be hitching a ride like that
alone in the dark. What did she expect?
A Dalit.
Untouchable.

________________________________________________________________________

When I heard about the young woman gang raped on a New Delhi bus and subsequently dying, I felt the despair many of us feel when we’ve been thinking and writing about these issues for many years. When I read about the Italian priest who wrote that women are partially responsible for domestic violence because they don’t cook and clean well enough and wear tight clothes, well, I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry.

So I did both, and sat down to write. By doing so, writers can only hope that our work, in some way, shines a light into these dark places. Two recent examples illustrate this.

Upon first reading, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls, a novel about Indian women struggling to find a way out of domestic violence and the impunity given to men who prey on the vulnerable and marginalized, seemed more fantasy that reality. But seeing the response to the young woman’s rape – the calls for systemic change both in attitudes and in the justice system – we can hope that Baldwin is just one of the lights shining in that darkness, helping make transformation possible.

Set in the 1980s, The Round House by Louise Erdrich highlights the similar ways in which First Nations women have been targeted for abuse and the lack of zeal in the search for the perpetrators. Wally Oppal’s report from the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry presented the evidence for this in Canada in distressing detail, but an earlier work by Maggie de Vries, Missing Sarah, that tells the story of her sister’s path to the downtown eastside of Vancouver and Willy Pickton’s farm, challenges our attitudes in a way that empowers us. And one thing you can be sure of, reports of missing women are not treated in the same cavalier attitude today.

Like many of us, these women are writing in what often feels like darkness. But, as Amnesty International says, it’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.
Light one tonight.

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National Day of Remembrance and Action Against Violence Against Women

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I returned two books to the library yesterday; The Sweet Girl by Annabel Lyon and The Selector of Souls by Shauna Singh Baldwin.  At first glance you’d think the books couldn’t be more different. Lyon’s story of Aristotle’s daughter Pythias, set in ancient Greece just after the death of Alexander the Great, is written with her usual spare style  – clear direct sentences, simple telling details, gaps in the narrative that often reveal more than the narrative itself. Baldwin’s epic story of two Hindu women – one seeking escape in the Catholic church, the other with one braceleted arm reaching out to the Sikh community – is twice as long and stuffed with description, characters, scenery and almost all the issues of twenty-first century India: domestic violence, the killing of infant girls, abortion rights, religious strife, AIDS, Hindu nationalism, test bombs, and terrorism.

But they are both stories of women struggling to find a way to live their own lives in a time and place that refuses to see past the fact of their femaleness and subsequently shuts down most options. When they either lose or leave the patriarchy that both supports and oppresses them, they try on different guises to determine which suits them best. Or rather, which guise allows them to be themselves. They are all women of great resourcefulness and courage. They are both books worth reading.

In a Globe and Mail article, Annabel Lyon wrote: “Sometimes it seems there are only two veins in ancient storytelling left to be mined: the parodic and the morally righteous. We enjoy clever anachronism or historical revisionism….We also enjoy the sensation of moral superiority we gain by looking back at less enlightened times. Weren’t women treated horribly back then! Wasn’t that outrageous!”

The same can be said of stories we read about countries like India. We lament the injustice and feel at least a twinge of righteousness. But on December 6, we would do well to swallow that feeling. On that day in 1989, 14 women were killed at the École Polytechnique in Montreal:

  • Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
  • Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
  • Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
  • Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk
  • Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
  • Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
  • Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
  • Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
  • Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
  • Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
  • Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

Marc Lépine killed them he said, because they were women. He did not know his victims. But most assaults against women are carried out by men they do know. In fact, one or more women are killed every week in Canada by their husbands, boyfriends or former partners.

There is a pivotal scene in Baldwin’s novel where the women of the community bring a female god out of her cave and insist their husbands listen to what she has to say. Because the women have united across caste and religious divisions, they are able to reveal that the men are often as oppressed by community expectations as the women are. Entrenched traditions begin to shift.

Our efforts to change thinking around gender roles and around domestic violence are continuing; stories like Lyon’s and Baldwin’s are welcome additions to this discussion.

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For Janet Elizabeth Dahr November 27, 1942 – January 9, 2012

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I wrote this last fall after talking to Janet on the phone; it seemed as if, after years of adamant refusal, she was preparing herself to leave us. Because I had never been to her house, she sat in her kitchen looking out the window and told me what she saw, bringing me into that room with her.

I first got to know her online; she took a creative writing course I was teaching. Her sister and her daughter, Diana, took the course at the same time and I came to realize what a powerful trio of women I had in my virtual classroom. Later I got to know Janet in person as she came to Smithers to help Diana with infant twins. In spite of her own struggles with illness, her presence was wonderfully positive – and fun! She was, I believe, determined to make herself part of those boys’ lives in a way that would take root and grow as they did. What lucky kids!

 

Janet, my fingers are cold, the tips stained from making applesauce. There’s dirt under the nails. Yesterday an inch of snow, today the air is moist and warm as if someone piled a load of damp sheets into a nearby dryer and turned it on. I try not to feel the urgency this time of year brings with it and clean out the weeds around a few spinach plants, plucked low, some leaves still green and crinkled. I dig in some compost and old horse manure, flick away the fox scat left perched on the mint leaves poking in from the sidelines.

The garden’s dark and dirty heart is emerging from under the cover of carrots and beets and chard and cabbage. I leave the kale for the deer, wondering as I always do this time of year when there is so much food stuffed in the fridge, in the freezer, in the cool room, in the jars lined up underneath the bed, why on earth I planted it. Beyond the garden’s contours, the fireweed, nettle and cow parsnip lie down in their own dramatic death dance, the nettle still carrying a sting.

So I hoe back two shallow gullies and bend to plant Mr. Fothergill’s Emilia F1 spinach, each seed a couple of inches apart, feeling, as always as if this is the most ridiculous act of faith – even though every year the spinach and the carrots and the beets and the peas prove more worthy of my faith than any god I’ve heard tell of. The pea pods may not always swell, or the carrots fatten, but what they do give feeds my friends and family and doesn’t smite us with war and plagues and affliction. They just go about their sturdy business as best they can down here in the canyon where everything takes its time and for some things, that time is never.

The hoe covers the wrinkled promises and I tamp down the rows, covering them with mesh to keep the cat from digging there. In a couple of weeks, a layer of straw. And then I’ll forget about them as I always do. Three feet of snow hanging around until mid-April some years.

Then bingo. Garlic shoots and rumpled spinach green in all that dark dirt. Sandhill cranes, thousands of them, overhead. Harlequins riding the returning creek and juncos under the feeder.

Where in all of that returning light and sound will you be? Quiet in the sun still slanting in your window? Quiet in the memories of grandchildren too young to bear you consciously? Oh, you’ll be there, don’t worry. You’ve been planted deep, like those spinach seeds, already unfurling into a kind of green life that will nourish them, make them strong. You’ll be there.

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Visiting Bonnie Burnard

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Joining a community of writers at places like Sage Hill, Banff, or any of the diverse retreats/residencies available to us these days, is usually a treat. We can begin conversations right in the middle of things because the writing process is familiar to us all, even though how we go about the work is as varied as human nature itself. We share the knowledge of what it is to sit down day after day to start moving our fingers and somehow transform whatever it is that goes on in our heads to words on the page, whether we’re using a pencil or a keyboard. If we wander around with a glazed look and don’t say good morning, other writers know enough to leave us alone. Best of all, you don’t have to explain what it is you do or why you do it.

Of course, egos and competitiveness are present, but at the retreats that are well run, there isn’t much grandstanding and the most acclaimed writers sit down with the novices and share stories as equals. It is very affirming for those of us who sometimes feel isolated from the writing world.

When I attended the Banff Writing Studio in 2002 and was told that I’d be working with Bonnie Burnard, I was more than a little anxious. The author of award winning short story collections and the Giller Prize winning A Good House, she was a very big name in Canadian writing, up there with Alice Munro and Carol Shields. She had just flown in from Mexico City with a nascent case of pneumonia; Banff’s air was cleaner, but the altitude did her in. I had one meeting with her before she was hospitalized, but as I’ve said before, that one meeting sent me on a long journey, taking Isabel from a short story I’d called “Frost Warning” and set in Smithers to Vancouver, Guatemala and deep into the lives of her daughter, Janna, and Janna’s father, Alvaro.

So when I arrived in London (Ontario) last week, I was tempted to track her down. I wanted to thank her and give her a copy of The Taste of Ashes. I was a bit nervous – her time in Banff hadn’t been easy for her (there’s a story there, but it’s hers to tell) and I didn’t think she’d even remember me. When I found out she lived very close to where I was staying, I finally screwed up my courage and called her. She seemed surprised, but very graciously invited me over the next morning for tea.

I’ve always been nonplussed by stories of people tracking down writers – searching for Pablo Neruda at Isla Negra, or nursing endless cups of coffee at the café Simone de Beauvoir frequented – so felt a bit nervous walking up the leaf-strewn path to her door right on the edge of the University of Western Ontario campus. And there she was, smaller than I remembered, welcoming me into her home and congratulating me on the publication of the novel.

Her house is a long one with glass doors opening into a sitting room, a sun porch, a living room, each room with multiple doorways. This kind of house is a treat for a child (and Bonnie has a new grandchild living nearby as well as two others) – the many nooks and crannies can provide escape from whatever might be happening in the house, but are also connected enough so he or she doesn’t feel alone. It’s the kind of house that exemplifies the kinds of plots I love to read and write – storylines that have their own lives but link in sometimes unexpected ways.

By which I mean to say we soon got down to talking about writing, about her writing life, about Banff, about how we go about things, how writers find ways to support each other, how we go through times when we lose sight of writing itself until we miss it so much, we sit down again and begin.

It was good to see Bonnie Burnard living in a comfortable house because so few writers make a decent living from their writing. It was a pleasure to sit at her kitchen table and talk writing because that talk is not always easy to come by.

While she expressed some concern about having suggested back in Banff that I write a novel, I said it was just what I needed because as soon as she said it a whole new world opened up for the characters living inside my imagination, characters her encouragement led me to release from the strict confines of what the current literary expectations are for short stories. Discursion is not permitted. (Even within the breadth of a novel, I have difficulty reining in my characters.)

So thank you, Bonnie. As for the writing talk itself, I look forward to someday reading in print the writing stories you told me.

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4000 Reasons

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In June, I took part in an event in Smithers to celebrate all the people who stood up to speak to the Joint Review Panel expressing opposition to the proposed Enbridge Northern  Gateway pipeline project. The event, organized by the  Driftwood Foundation, included an afternoon of poetry and performance, a wild salmon barbecue, and an evening concert featuring many regional performers, including Wet’suwet’en dancers, Rachelle Van Zan Zanten, Alex Cuba, Magpie Ulysses, Miriam Colvin, and Los Gringos Salvajes. To view this video, go to https://vimeo.com/51033807.

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Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime

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I’ve just finished reading tiny beautiful things: Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed. I first came across Dear Sugar in The Sun magazine – a wonderful magazine of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Its contributors speak in a voice similar to Sugar’s. Fearsome advice, often, and harrowing stories that are above all else, beautifully written.  Cheryl Strayed is a very big deal now (she just “came out” as Sugar and also had her new novel, Wild, kick-start Oprah to begin a new book club. It’s always a bit tough when a tiny beautiful thing you’ve come across unexpectedly turns out to be a very big thing many people know about and have been following for years. But what the hell – she’s great.

And while the book covers all the usual topics – love, work, children, addiction, Christmas and stupidity – it is also a handbook for writers. Her tone is reminiscent of Anne Lemott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Like Lemott she has a history of addiction, abuse and general trauma that she refers to when she responds to those who ask for advice. Her language is blunt and sometimes brutal. But she tempers it all with generosity and kindness.  We all fuck up, she says, and that’s how we learn. She answers a letter from a man who has lost his son in a car accident and is actually useful. She tells you to get on with it while acknowledging that nothing will remove the pain you’ve experienced. The bad things that have been done to you. The awful things you have done. Above all she tells you to face up to your bullshit  (and others) truthfully and keep climbing out of whatever hole you’re in.

“We’re all going to die, Johnny,” she writes. “Hit the iron bell like it’s dinner time.”

Which is all great advice for a writer. Get on with it. Write. Write truly and write well. “Write,” she says, “like a motherfucker.”

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Love Electric

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It all began with the sign down at Cow Bay in Prince Rupert. It hung on the weathered boards outside an automarine store right down there beside the docks, the name spelled out in fading black paint: Love Electric.

ImageThe building dates back to 1919 and still stands. But it no longer houses Love Electric. (I just checked to see that the company is still operating – it is. Its email address is lovelectric@hotmail.com. Come Valentine’s Day, it might be fun to send them a message.)

I was sitting in a coffee shop just down the road and started scribbling. I wrote three stories about people who had unexpected sex with unlikely partners: a suicidal meter reader, a bored housewife who decides to become an electrician, and a woman working in a Saan store. Isabel. I took Isabel along with me to the Banff Writing Studio, where I worked with Bonnie Burnard (A Good House, Suddenly). She suggested I turn it into a novel. At first I quailed at the thought, but ideas just came pouring out and I was off on a journey that took me to some amazing places – both physically and emotionally: the back rooms of a Saan store, the cemetery in Guatemala, the provincial house of the Oblates, the streets of Vancouver’s downtown eastside.

I wanted to explore the life of a woman others might think of as a victim or an irresponsible parent, but who views herself as someone strong, who makes mistakes, yes, but keeps going and refuses to be judged. You could maybe call this “family practice.” While mothers mostly love their children, sometimes their children are not particularly likeable. And visa versa. Isabel and her daughter Janna need to make their own way in the world, but also reconcile. Figuring out how to make this happen was much of the fun of writing this book. And it made me realize that sometimes it is the most dysfunctional families that are best equipped to dig in during crises and really support each other.

One of the difficulties for both of them is Isabel’s refusal to tell Janna who her father is. You know how it is when you keep a secret too long? It gets harder and harder to come clean. Which brings in the issue of the Catholic church (now there’s an outfit that knows all about secrets) and the behaviour of its priests. Father Àlvaro Ruiz snuck up on me as I was writing The Taste of Ashes. I am not Catholic and am more than uncomfortable with many of the church’s teachings. But I am fascinated with the way people of amazing diversity negotiate their way through that to make themselves a place within the church. They stick out their elbows and wriggle their way in. Often their very presence makes people uncomfortable because it forces them to re-examine their own beliefs. As Àlvaro struggles with this, he finds links with his Mayan heritage and that of our own First Nations communities – links that Catholic missionaries may think they forged, but are really connections that have roots in a much older indigenous spirituality linked to the land itself.

What has been intriguing for me in this process is the way I’ve come to feel about the characters in The Taste of Ashes – not just the three main characters but some of the secondary ones as well: Margaret Coleman, Amy Myerson and Father Walter. They are like old friends now, people who have shared many experiences with me. In the novel, we’ve all come to know each other. Publication has given me a chance to introduce them to you.

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Nuchatlitz

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We recently stayed in a cabin on a small unnamed island near Nuchatlitz, a former Nuchatlaht community off the west coast of Vancouver Island. The small island is privately owned by twelve people, but most of the surrounding area is either reserve or provincial park. We were there to kayak, but we were also visiting a place we’d read about. In 2001, our publishing company, Creekstone Press, reprinted John Gibson’s A Small and Charming World, a book first published in 1972 that told of Gibson’s time as a social worker in Smithers and later in Campbell River. The book’s last chapter contains a particularly poignant reference to Nuchatlitz.  At one time about 3000 people lived in the area, but when he flew in to pick up a little girl going to school in Campbell River, only five houses were occupied. When we were there, one unoccupied house remained and its last occupant, Lily Michael, was buried in the overgrown cemetery across the inlet. We so often think of these isolated places as wilderness, but they have been occupied for centuries, and contain many stories. Which is why writers look for places like this.

Virginia Woolf told us we needed a room of our own. In the Sea Watch cabin in Nuchatlitz, also known as Witt’s End, there are many rooms, each lined with books. Among those books, I found a collection of essays by E.B. White, The Second Tree from the Corner, in which he contrasts his writing practice to that of a contemporary who sits down at home where his “privacy is guarded” and works in an orderly and diligent manner to accomplish a great deal. White says that his “professional life has been a long, shameless exercise in avoidance.” His home is, he says, “designed for the maximum of interruption,” his office the place he never is. How can a writer not love E.B. White? How can a writer not love Witt’s End?

While each room has a table inviting the writer to sit down with a notebook, out the windows are sea otters, cedars, rhododendrons, driftwood installations, and a greedy young crow eating the salal berries growing out of one of those installations. And the books. Downstairs, Chinese literature, the classics, fiction, history, the restoration plays. Bill Kinsella, Margaret  Atwood, Virgil, A Dream of Red Mansions.

In the kitchen, beside the binoculars on the windowsill, the plant/bird/seashore/animal guidebooks.

You must climb the steep stairs to find the poets, ranged along the floor in a room with windows on three sides and skylights, a bed tucked into a dormer, the chimney from the wood stove below bringing warmth into its spaciousness. And a table, of course.

I brought a collection of Bruce Chatwin’s work along and, while it started well enough, seemed to become one of those publications designed to plump the coffers of his estate – some work would have been better left “unpublished or neglected.” In it he writes about the two towers where he writes well – one on the Welsh border and one in Tuscany. It is, he says, “a place where I have always worked clearheadedly and well, in winter and summer, by day or night – and the places you work well in are the places you love the most.”

Seawatch could become one of those places – and writer Paula Wild uses it for her own escapes and also runs writing retreats there. Shannon Bailey, the co-owner with Brian Witt, writes there too. She and Brian left Victoria (where she completed a Creative Writing degree at UVic) over a decade ago to live almost full time at Nuchatlitz. You really are a long way away from anywhere – an hour’s boat ride from Tahsis, which is about a three-hour drive from Campbell River.

You’d think it would be perfect. But the work to keep a place like Sea Watch running (solar energy, rain water cisterns, generators, boat maintenance and wild west coast weather) is, as White said, “designed for the maximum of interruption.” Like waiting for the right tides to put the sailboat up onto a neighbour’s makeshift dry-dock in order to scrape the barnacles off the hull, messy and physically demanding work, done in the dark, in the pouring rain. And anyone who’s lived in a place with only boat access knows the minutiae of hauling things up and down docks, in and out of boats, and offloading at a slippery low tide.

And then there are the distractions of all the artifacts the ocean offers up.  There are hundreds of installations in every available space, inside and out. Shells, skulls, feathers, tiny congregations in mossy corners, as well as the reminders of the many places Shannon and Brian have travelled.

The perfect retreat, I think, needs to be someone else’s tower – as Chatwin said. Where someone else is bringing in the groceries, doing the upkeep, weeding the gardens. Or, as I suggested to Shannon – a real winter. I always look forward to October here in Driftwood Canyon – dropping temperatures put a quick end to any silly notions about another crop of spinach, by November the snow covers all those projects that call for attention all spring and summer, and it’s dark so early and so late, you’re not distracted by the play of light on the trees. You leave the curtains open and stare out into the darkness, thinking.

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Thanks to  Dan Shervill for letting me use some of his photos.

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Don’t try this at home

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I found a collection of E.B. White’ essays – The Second Tree from the Corner – while staying in the Seawatch cabin last month (more on that later). The title essay is especially beautiful and there’s a great piece about thieves stealing a car’s tires while leaving valuable jewelry untouched. “Roses are red,” the thieves write, “violets are blue – we like your jewels but your tires are new.” Not a poetic thief, White argues, but a case “of a poet who was willing to attempt any desperate thing, even larceny, in order to place his poem.” How long the poet much have searched, White writes, to find just the right spot for this particular verse: “Poets endure much for the sake of their art.”