A Poet’s Nanaimo

Earle Street

Arleen Pare’s new book of poems, Earle Street (Talonbooks, 2020), has such a charming cover. The illustration is by Andrea Bennett who also designed the cover and interior of the book.  Andrea got her BA in English and French from the University of Guelph. Of course they did! There’s always a connection to Guelph (where I used to live before moving west fifteen years ago).

There’s a whole world on a street when you think of the various ages, ethnicities, races, life experiences and so on.  And there are memories on a street, of streets you used to live on as well as musings on the people you see pass by and the stories you hear about people who once lived there.  “This Street is a World” is one of the sections of Arleen’s book along with other sections that see the street as a river, an arboretum, and a window.

Arleen has written poems about trees (most important is the Katsura which she says is beautiful and sympathetic), the birds (with a “November Bird Count From Inside the House”), rats, a grey squirrel, an orange cat,  the people, the naming of the street, memories of her own ancestors, and of her own past. All of these aspects, including the various forms used, make it a rich and intimate exploration of place as well as with oneself.

Earle Street is dedicated to Arleen’s “neighbours who are friendly and kind.” Earle Street, the actual street, is in Victoria, B.C. where Arleen lives with her wife Chris Fox.

“This Land is a Language” is a beautiful exploration of place and language. The street of which Arleen writes is on the “unceded territories” of “The Songhees and Esquimalt Nations   the Lekwungen […]

Celebrating the Chandeleers

There’s a  handmade sign in red letters on the sidewalk outside the Nanaimo Bakery that says “Bakery Open” which means people can still buy their bread and sweet treats these days. But, the café part of the bakery isn’t open right now which means the Chandelier Coffee Writers are not having their monthly gatherings.

A group of women writers from Nanaimo and surrounding towns such as Lantzville and Chemainus as well as Gabriola Island, have been meeting for a couple of years. We began calling ourselves the chandeliers or the “chandeleers” as Ursula Vaira wrote recently, as we were used to meeting monthly at the Nanaimo Bakery which has many chandeliers – possibly twenty or so.

Kim Clark and I were planning to meet in January 2018 at the Nanaimo Bakery aka the German Bakery.   She thought it would be a good idea to invite other women writers to our coffee klatch and thus began our monthly gatherings at the bakery with the chandeliers, inviting other writers to join us as we went along.

We don’t have an agenda and our conversations range from local events, personal goings-on, and things happening farther afield although there’s not too much of the latter. If we had tried, we couldn’t have put together such an amazing group of writers who write in all genres. The photo above is of our book table at the Federation of B.C. Writers Spring W(Rites) Festival in Nanaimo in May 2019 with thanks to Darryl Knowles, Kim Clark’s partner, for creating a wondrous Chandelier Coffee Writers sign.

Kim Clark says our group is both “brilliant and eclectic (literarily and otherwise, lol).” She told me in a recent email that The STORYHIVE-funded pilot of Disease & Desire, a […]

Why Bother?

I think it was in a dream I told someone I survived cancer and rather than adopt a healthy eating regime, I ate and drank whatever I wanted. Perhaps that is a sort of gusto too, an embrace of life. But there was a “ho hum” feeling about everything rather than gusto. I satisfied myself with “shadow comforts” as Jennifer Louden refers to them. (Her first book was The Woman’s Comfort Book.) Shadow comforts do comfort but are not life-sustaining.

When I looked at the stage of my writing in On Being Stuck by Laraine Herring (Shambhala, 2016), I saw that one stage near the middle was “who cares.” An idea and enthusiasm precedes it and  following it are re-commitment, and a plan including the reminder that I have completed projects before.

I have managed to get through that “who cares” stage and I gradually emerged from the “ho hum” stage following radiation treatments and surgery four years ago. Then Covid-19. Just when I was looking forward to continuing a writing circle with the theme of “Welcome Your Spirit Back” as well as offering writing workshops for seniors, a poetry workshop at the library and attending lots of readings and book launches for April, National Poetry month.

I’ve continued with doing the Writing Life women’s writing circles “from away” and reading and writing reviews and this blog. I feel rather busy actually.

Perhaps being busy is another of the “shadow comforts” Jennifer Louden speaks of. The busyness may be all sorts of things that take us away from what we really want to do.

Jennifer’s new book is Why Bother? Discover the Desire for What’s Next (Page Two, 2020). She refers to a person called Sam “who got through […]

World Enough & Time

My library books aren’t due until June! There’s one huge volume of poetry I’m glad to keep until then but that means no borrowing either. I’m grateful we can order books from local independent bookstores as they are “open” in that way these days. Also, I can look to my own bookshelves where there is a wealth of fascinating material worth dipping into again.

World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down by Christian McEwen (Bauhan Publishing, 2011) is one of those books  The cover image shows the desk McEwen used the first time she stayed at the MacDowell Colony for writers in Peterborough, New Hampshire, taken by their in-house photographer Jo Morrissey. The inset photograph is by publisher Sarah Bauhan of a Scottish landscape in south west Galloway. Christian McEwen was born in London and grew up in the Borders of Scotland. She now lives in Williamsburg, Massachusetts.

While writing World Enough & Time, McEwen explored “the ways in which ordinary joy might flourish in a culture addicted to speed and over-work.” As a reader, I got to do that sort of exploration too, long before we had any notion of a world pandemic changing our busy world in the early spring of 2020. The book is definitely the compendium McEwen intended “to which readers can turn again and again in search of nourishment.”

Christian McEwen urges us to slow down, pause and reflect. Some of us are getting more of an opportunity to do that these days.

World Enough & Time is a pleasure to read for McEwen’s wisdom, the sharing of her own story as well as for the many reminders of beloved poets and writers like Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Henry David […]

The Bright Way

A couple of things haven’t changed during the global pandemic: the mail and the marketing of books. Although books are being marketed and publicized in different ways these days, I found that the publicist at Raincoast Books in Vancouver was right on a recent request. It shipped out the next day and arrived the day after that (in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island). Amazing when everything else has really slowed down or stopped. Actually, I should say that was probably a rare example.

One of the books that came via Raincoast before all this current state of upheaval was 365 Days of Creativity (Hardie Grant Books, 2019) by Lorna Scobie. It’s so inviting with all its visual prompts. Another came from New World Library:  The Bright Way: Five Steps to Freeing the Creative Within by Diana Rowan, published this year.

With all the creativity happening these days to keep people occupied and upbeat, you may have your own idea about “five steps.” Maybe there are no steps at all. Creativity flows in various forms in the garden, the kitchen, negotiating the grocery store, and posting discoveries and fears on Facebook.

I like what Jan Phillips has to say in “The Artist’s Creed”: I believe that what truly matters in the making of art is not what the final piece looks like or sounds like, not what it is worth or not worth, but what newness gets added to the universe in the process of the piece itself becoming.

Diana Rowan is a musician and composer who performs and teaches in the San Francisco Bay area. She is enthusiastic in her approach to creativity in her book, The Bright Way. She says “creativity is a way of life, not merely a goal.” […]

The Author’s Checklist

I went to three performances/readings in a week all in Nanaimo, B.C. at different locations with three different storytellers. It’s always inspiring to see and hear how writers and storytellers are putting their work into the world. Ivan Coyote is a storyteller from Whitehorse, Yukon who travels the world and publishes books – twelve so far that they have authored or co-edited. And Ivan has created four short films and three CDs that combine storytelling with music.

Sheila Norgate who describes herself as a “feminist rabble rouser” is a visual artist from Gabriola Island who has created several one-woman shows often using as a resource her awesome collection of vintage books aimed at women on the subjects of etiquette, charm and beauty.

Susan Juby is a creative writing professor at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo who has written several books in various genres and is probably best known for her books that became a television series: “Alice, I Think.”

All three are writers. They started with the blank page or the blank screen and explored and discovered and opened themselves up to their own vulnerabilities.

Besides going to readings, I find it a lot of fun to get together with some local women writers once a month at the Nanaimo Bakery. I did that recently too! We don’t have an agenda and we get to have a laugh or two and share information about the publishing world while enjoying a very reasonably priced brunch. I highly recommend this informal way of gathering to share tips and offer support.

Ivan Coyote is a storyteller and performer who tells stories on the page as delightfully as in person. I noticed many local storytellers and writers at Ivan’s show at the north […]

On Wings of Words

It’s usually the illustrations that attract me to children’s books. I’ve found some wonderful children’s books, particularly about poets and artists, that I enjoy for awhile and then pass on to my grandchildren, Briar and Gage, or to a young friend.

The latest is On Wings of Words: The Extraordinary Life of Emily Dickinson (Chronicle Books, 2020). I’m a fan of Emily Dickinson’s poetry or perhaps I’m intrigued by her solitary life in her Amherst, Massachusetts home.

I was so fascinated by Emily Dickinson that my daughter’s name is Emily and when she was a teenager we took a drive from Toronto to Amherst, Massachusetts to see the Dickinson home. (We also went to Springfield, Mass where there is a basketball museum as that’s what my Emily especially wanted to see.)

Jennifer Berne, the author of On Wings of Words, says her definition of poetry is as follows: “Poetry is a deep exploration of each subject the poet approaches. An exploration that starts with the poet looking, feeling, thinking. Wondering. Imagining. Discovering. Then – and this is the magic of poetry – through that exploration, words begin to emerge . . . “ She leaves us with the words of Emily Dickinson at the end of the book.

I reckon – when I count at all —
First – Poets – Then the Sun —
Then Summer – Then the Heaven of God —
and then – the List is done

But, looking back – the First so seems
to Comphrehend the Whole —
The Others look a needless Show —
So I write – Poets – All –

The artist of On Wings of Words is Becca Stadtlander who says the illustrations in the book “come from actual historical images whenever possible, maintaining historical accuracy […]

We Are the Luckiest

In the early days of Laura McKowen’s sobriety, she realized she was lucky to feel her feelings, live honestly, be more present in her life. She recognized that “those of us who answer the invitation to wake up, whatever our invitation, are really the luckiest of all.” Her new book is We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life (New World Library, 2020) which she dedicates to her daughter Alma.

The book is engaging and fast-paced to match Laura’s very full life. Her story begins in 2013 when Laura was the “thirty-five-year-old director at a global marketing agency, a marathon runner, a yoga teacher, and a mama to one.” She had had a twenty-year history with alcohol by then and her first sentence gets right to the point: “On July 13, 2013, the night of my brother’s wedding, I left my four-year-old daughter alone in a hotel room overnight because I was blackout drunk.”

Laura addresses the reader throughout her book such as: “I don’t know what your thing is, but alcohol was mine” in the first chapter entitled “This is My Thing.”

The words of endorsement on the book’s front cover, “Fearless, eloquent, powerful,” were written by Dani Shapiro. Dani has written several bestselling novels and memoirs, the latest of which is Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019). An early memoir, published over twenty years ago is Slow Motion: A Memoir of a Life Rescued by Tragedy (Harper Perennial, 2010).

The tragedy in Dani’s memoir was a car crash that took the life of her father and had her mother suffering from more than 80 fractures. At the time of the accident, neither was expected to live. As […]

Embroidered Life

While thinking of the various ways women’s hands have created so many beautiful things (I wrote a poem called “Women’s Hands”), I’m also exploring personal essays and their various forms. As it turns out, the two go very well together and share common threads so to speak.

Sarah Minor’s essay “What Quilting and Embroidery Can Teach us About Narrative Form” appeared first in Creative Non-Fiction Issue #64 and I found it online at Literary Hub.

Minor says, as a nonfiction writer, the snatching of lost memories “reminds me that the narratives we live inside are never linear from the start. Our stories are patterns of experiences, a few knit together and the vast remainder discarded as scrap. She mentions the “braided essay” where past and future are visited, by the reader, alternately “skipping across time and space as if following the path through a distracted mind. But the real beauty of a successful braid is how the ‘threads’ combine thematically to form a more complete and pliable piece of nonfiction.”

In a section of Minor’s essay entitled “Quilted Essays,” she describes the domestic art of quilting. “In many cultures, quilts act as historical documents that preserve narratives about place and identity. A scholar named Mara Witzling has written that quilts historically “enabled women to speak the truth about their lives”, by joining many disparate fragments. Some of the fragments sewn into the quilt could have been inherited from ancestors.

Quilters “piece” together sections of fabric with even stitches beginning in the middle as is the case with many traditional patterns. As Sarah Minor says: “As a material metaphor for nonfiction, writers interested in new forms might consider ‘piecing’ sections of text as a means of working outwards from a […]

The Wild Unknown Archetypes

The beginning of a new year is an ideal time to do a card spread using The Tarot or any type of divination deck. The Wild Unknown Archetypes (HarperCollins, 2019) is Kim Krans’s latest divination deck and it came my way in time to do a card spread following Winter Solstice on the day before the New Moon on December 25th.

I can see all sorts of applications for The Wild Unknown Archetype Deck including asking questions regarding specific projects or situations as well as consulting the cards in the midst of writing a poem or another piece of writing i.e. choosing one card. A whole new window will open up and perhaps a new character or guide will appear:  The Poet, The Shapeshifter or The Comic (from among The Selves in the deck).

Kim Krans illustrated the revelatory power of archetypes in her latest deck of cards with her line drawings, watercolour paintings, and collage. The oracle cards are round and are divided into four suits: The Selves, the Places, The Tools, and The Initiations. They come in a round box with a ribbon for lifting them out. A square box, decorated within and without, holds the cards and Guidebook. A beautiful presentation.

The Guidebook that comes with the oracle deck includes an introduction by Kim Krans about her graduate studies with a Jungian approach to creativity in southern California. Many of the images on the cards were formed “as much by The Ocean at they were by me,” she says. “In many ways I do not feel like I made this deck. It made me. It put me back together, one salty droplet at a time.”

Carl Jung developed and integrated the concept of archetypes into […]