A Poet’s Nanaimo

Haiku in Canada

You may think that a book entitled Haiku in Canada would be a very thick one. There’s a lot of territory to cover going back to the 1940s when haiku was written by Japanese people forced to live in internment camps in Canada during the second world war.

But haiku is short, remember?  English-language haiku are usually fewer than 17 syllables, written on three horizontal lines. As Terry Ann Carter says in her new book, Haiku in Canada (Ekstasis Editions, 2020): “In Japanese, haiku consists of 17 morae or on, “sound beats written vertically.”

In her introduction to the book, Terry Ann says: “A haiku attempts to capture the ‘aha moment’ – the moment, not the syllables, is what matters most.” Haiku in Canada is full of those illuminating “aha moments.”

As Stephen Addiss said in his book, The Art of Haiku (Shambhala, 2012), “Haiku can find an inner truth from an outward phenomenon, and ultimately use words to go beyond words.”

“Another definition of haiku is ‘one-breath poetry,’ “ Terry Ann says.

Terry Ann has done a masterful job with her book as she combines “one breath poetry” with the organizational skills and the attention to detail needed to gather names and dates; book titles for the reference section; lists of conferences and haiku websites. And she weaves her own reminiscences of her life in haiku into this tribute to Haiku in Canada.

I remember writing haiku more than fifteen years ago when Sarah and I still lived in Guelph, Ontario.  The Arboretum at the University of Guelph featured several gardens including the Japanese Garden. It’s various elements such as the pathway to the teahouse, the salutation gateway, stepping stones, a reflecting pool, the kenninji-gaki bamboo fence and the […]

Destination Unknown: Ritual as Road Map

We’ve entered the Winter quarter of the year called Samhain on the Celtic calendar, a time of year that brings the gifts of restoration and renewal if we remember to follow Nature’s wisdom. As the cold weather closes in, the soul is led to more reflective depths. I’m reminding myself as I write this to do more inner reflection and less outer connecting – or find some equilibrium with the two.

I do love keeping connected to people, with this blog for instance, and I also appreciate beginning each day sitting at my writing table.

Restoration and renewal happens in a weekly Writing Life women’s writing circle that very much feels like an oasis. We’re free to bring whatever we are feeling to the circle. Although we all can’t meet in person, there is an opportunity to join the Writing Life Circle “from away.” You can write in your journal as we do in the circle in Nanaimo and ring the Tibetan ting sha to mark your intentional beginning (or something else that helps you begin your writing practice.) Creativity coach, Eric Maisel, chooses a particular coffee mug from a favourite city each day to begin his daily practice.

The dates of the next Writing Life Circle “from away” are Wednesday, November 11 to Wednesday, December 16: six Wednesdays on which I send out notes, resources, and writing practice prompts. It’s all done by email.

The theme of “Destination Unknown: Ritual as Road Map” came about as I’ve used the “destination unknown” theme in summer writing circles in the past. We don’t know where we’ll end up when we set out to write and we make discoveries along the way.

There can be restoration and renewal by connecting to […]

The Power of Daily Practice

I have a daily morning practice of sitting at a table in front of my bedroom window. I greet all my guides including the mountain known as the Grandmother of All Surrounding Mountains to the Snuneymuxw First Nation on whose unceded land I live. I write my dreams in a journal and continue writing memories that could become a personal essay or a series of poems. I’ve realized that while my morning practice isn’t meant to “accomplish” anything, that can happen as I write a bit each day. I’ve done that with reading books of poetry too, reading a few poems a day until I’ve completed the collection. One of them was To the Wren: Collected & New Poems, 1991-2019 by the late Jane Mead which is almost 600 pages long.

Eric Maisel, a creativity coach in California, has a new book entitled The Power of Daily Practice (New World Library, 2020). Eric has written more than fifty books and one of them, A Writer’s San Francisco (New World Library, 2006), prompted me to name this blog “A Poet’s Nanaimo.” (I’ve been following his work for about twenty years!)

Eric accomplishes a lot and I’m getting an idea as to how he does it by treating each day as a series of daily practices. He says daily practice “is as much about paying attention to your life purpose choices as it is about getting something done.”

Thinking in those terms, chores and tasks such as grocery shopping take on new meaning. If one of my daily practices is to tend to my body with healthy food and exercise, then choosing food for the week is tending to that practice.

A daily practice as Eric describes it “is the […]

Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats)

“How did you two meet?” a participant in a poetry retreat asked Lorna Crozier when we were gathered in a lounge at a retreat centre on Vancouver Island at the end of a day of writing. Lorna had told the story of meeting Patrick Lane to those of us at the retreat the year before and yet, we were all keen to hear it again.

Quite a few of us had been studying with Patrick Lane for several years and had heard his version of the story. Mostly we had heard about the blue-jean jumpsuit Lorna was wearing on the day he met her.

Lorna describes the meeting in her new marvelous memoir, Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats) (McClelland & Stewart, 2020). (Cover design: Emma Dolan.)

Patrick was teaching a day-long poetry workshop at the library in Regina, Saskatchewan. Lorna, at the time, was teaching high school and working as a guidance counsellor in Swift Current when she drove the three hours to Regina.

Poetry is “how I’ve made my way through the world. Line by line, heartbeat by heartbeat. It’s who I am, who Patrick is, it’s how we met,” she writes in Through the Garden which begins and ends with excerpts from Patrick’s exquisite memoir There is a Season (McClelland & Stewart, 2004) as well as a poem by Lorna, “Poem Me,” which made me weep.

Lorna was wearing her blue-jean jumpsuit when she met Patrick and “leaned forward into the force of his attention, listening to his words like someone starved of language who had just learned to read.” He was wearing jeans and a cowboy shirt with snap buttons.

About a week after the workshop, Patrick sent a note to Lorna at the […]

Midnight Train to Prague

Nanaimo has an abundance of writers including poets, spoken word performers, novelists, short story writers, humorists, bloggers, storytellers, historians, and journalists. Among the novelists and short story writers is Carol Windley, an award-winning, Vancouver Island-born writer.

Carol has two story collections including Home Schooling, winner of the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. An earlier novel is Breathing Under Water and her latest, published this year by HarperCollins, is Midnight Train to Prague.

Carol was born in Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island and her brother Steve Guppy was born in Nanaimo. He is also a writer and as Carol describes him: “a wonderful poet and an accomplished short story writer, novelist, and former creative writing prof at VIU [Vancouver Island University].” Steve’s wife Nelly Kazenbroot is a poet and has published books for children.

Two writers in the family “was probably more than enough,” Carol told me when I asked her lots of questions about the writing of her new novel. She remembers when she and Steve were children: “When Steve and I were about six and ten we’d write stories and then ask Mom to pick the one she liked best. Wisely, she said she liked both stories and couldn’t decide.”

Robert Windley, Carol’s husband, took the lovely photograph of her. They met in Nanaimo and have lived in various places on the island before settling her Nanaimo. They have a daughter, Tara.

Writing Practice

I asked Carol about her writing practice and routine and wondered if she is one who writes first and does research later or the reverse? She said: “I love the early, quiet hours of the day. If I can, I get up at about five, […]

Inside the Treasure House

It’s been several months since there’s been a ringing of the ting sha and lighting of the candle to mark the beginning of the Writing Life women’s writing circle in my living room in Nanaimo. Hopefully, we’ll be able to meet in person again in September in a living room larger than mine so that we can be safely distanced.

Writing Life Circle “from away”

There will definitely be a Writing Life women’s writing circle “from away” which will begin on Wednesday, September 16th. Wherever you are, you can join the Writing Life Circle “from away” and be part of a circle where we keep in touch via email.

As I’ve been thinking of museums lately, treasure houses of artifacts collected by people with a theme, I’ve come up with the theme of “Inside the Treasure House” for the six-week writing circle. Actually, it extends an extra week this time to October 28th as we won’t be “meeting” on October 7th.

If you would like to contact me with your questions or to sign up, please email me at creativity@maryannmoore.ca.

Weekly Themes

Each weekly circle also has a theme beginning with “The treasure that is you” on Wednesday, September 16th. You can find the other dates and themes here.

Phases of the Moon

You’ll see on the page with the dates and themes that I’ve also mentioned the phases of the moon for each circle. When we begin on September 16th, it will be a day before the New Moon, when the moon is dark. It’s an excellent time for setting an intention for your writing as a daily, restorative practice.

I have found that making note of the changes around us, as summer becomes fall, we have a path into the story […]

Women Rowing North

Mary Pipher, a “baby boomer” born in 1947, wrote Writing to Change The World, a book I continue to dip into. Turns out, I was born in 1947 too. Mary was born in the Missouri Ozarks in the United States and I was born in North Bay, Ontario, Canada.

Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age (Bloomsbury, 2019) is Mary’s latest book and is for women transitioning from middle age to old age. There can be a tendency to think about what she didn’t cover when it comes to women aging but the book has been written as if seamlessly, blending Mary’s own story with the stories of the women she interviewed and with some facts, figures and pertinent quotes from poets and writers. And if your story is missing, I say, it’s time to write it!

The focus of the book is on women, who like Mary “are on the cusp of change.” She turned seventy when she was writing the book. “Women in their sixties and early seventies are crossing a border and everything interesting happens at borders,” she writes.

Women were interviewed from all over the United States “from many different educational, economic, and cultural backgrounds.” They aren’t identified by race. As Mary notes, “Women our age vary by race, cultural background, employment, socioeconomic status, geographic region, and sexual preferences. Likewise, we range from women who are full-time caregivers to those who have no such responsibilities.”

Many women’s stories are told or combined and there is a focus on four women called Willow, Kestrel, Emma and Sylvia.

Mary has learned that she needs constant “reminders to be present and grateful.” That’s the case for most of us and as she has realized: […]

Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey

People who know me hear me talk of Turkey a lot and observe me searching out Turkish shops, cafes and the like. It sounds as if I travelled to Turkey earlier this year. I have talked about going back to Turkey, specifically Istanbul, but I was actually first there in the spring of 1998. That’s a long time ago! The goddess pilgrimage I took to ancient sites in Turkey had a profound effect. That pilgrimage and the one taken a few years before it to Crete, led me to begin offering women’s writing circles back home in Toronto where I lived at the time.

Learning about peaceful, ancient communities where women were honoured and men were supportive allies, gave me hope that we could do it again. Telling our stories to one another, in a circle, was a practice I wanted to continue at home.

I’m pleased to say that I have a new writing resource called Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey. It’s available as a PDF workbook of eight chapters with lots of writing practice suggestions on the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW) website. I’m a member of the IAJW Journal Council and thanks to Lynda Monk, Director of the IAJW, the materials I have used in writing circles for many years have become a new workbook beautifully designed by Mark Hand.

You can find out lots more about it and order it here.

Photo/collage: The Mother Goddess of Catal Hoyuk, Anatolia
from Chapter 7: “Honouring Your Ancestors”

Athough I say “new,” this workbook has been twenty years in the making. Some women who are still on my mailing list and may be reading this, attended a “Remembering the Goddess: Mapping Your Spiritual Journey” women’s writing circle […]

Two From Mother Tongue

The latest books of poetry published by Mother Tongue Publishing on Salt Spring Island are the broken boat by Daniela Elza and Disappearing Minglewood Blues by M.C. Warrior. Mother Tongue has published an abundance of poets through the years including some gorgeous anthologies such as Forcefield: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia (2013) edited by Susan Musgrave which I had the pleasure of reviewing for the Vancouver Sun. Have a look at Mother Tongue’s offerings including works of non-fiction such as the Unheralded Artists of BC Series as well as their books of fiction. All of the books can be requested from your local independent bookstore or directly from Mother Tongue Publishing.

the broken boat by Daniela Elza

Daniela Elza was to have been in Nanaimo in April to launch the broken boat (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2020), her fourth book of poetry.  (How can you launch a broken boat you may ask?!) I was looking forward to hosting at the Harbourfront branch of the Vancouver Island Regional Library, seeing Daniela and giving her a warm Nanaimo welcome. As Daniela’s readings were cancelled due to the Covid-19 pandemic, she’s been doing interviews online as well as readings via Zoom. I was glad to attend her Planet Earth Poetry (PEP) reading on a recent Friday evening and to get the feel of hanging out with other poets as would usually happen on a Friday night in Victoria.

Daniela’s reading was beautiful as she read, moving her hands (as someone noted) through a selection of poems from the broken boat. She mentions hands in her poems too such as in “suddenly leaves”:

 

her hands warm
with a longing . . . .

Miranda Pearson describes the collection in her cover endorsement: “This brave […]

Five Little Indians

“Residential schools will always be the sorrow in Canada’s bones,” Richard Van Camp says in his cover endorsement of Five Little Indians, Michelle Good’s debut novel (Harper Perennial, 2020).
Five Little Indians tells the story of five friends who survive a church-run residential school to which they refer as Indian School or Mission School. While Michelle Good uses actual place names, in most cases in the novel, such as Port McNeil and Vancouver, B.C., the location of the Indian School isn’t given.

There were at least twenty-two residential schools in B.C. The abuse that went on in the school of the novel, part of a school system for First Nations children that was created by the Canadian government in the mid-1880s, could be said of any of the residential schools across Canada.

Michelle Good is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. She’s a lawyer who worked with Indigenous communities and organizations before she got her law degree. Michelle also earned her MFA in creative writing at UBC while practising law and lives and writes in south central British Columbia.

Five Little Indians is a beautiful, heart-opening novel that won the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction in 2018. Michelle has taken her knowledge and woven it into a fictionalized account of five First Nations people who find their way following their early lives at the same Mission School in B.C. In her acknowledgements, Michelle pays tribute to her mother, Martha Eliza Soonias Stiff, “who lived through the hell of one of these schools.”

The five children taken from their families as small children are Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie. Most are released from the school with no support […]