A Poet’s Nanaimo

Sara Graefe, editor of Swelling with Pride (Dagger Editions, 2018) and “proud queer mom,” assembled more than twenty-five creative non-fiction LGBTQ2 authors from across North America for the book sub-titled  Queer Conception and Adoption Stories. Sara lives with her wife and school-aged son in Vancouver and is on faculty in the Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia. As Sara says in the introduction, “There’s no straightforward path to LGBTQ2 parenthood.” She found the curating of the collection to be healing work and a privilege to work with queer women, trans and genderqueer folk who shared intimate stories and experiences that were life-altering.

It’s an amazing collection of stories of the various hurdles the contributors had to overcome to attain their passionate desire for parenthood. There are exceptions to the end result. For Marusya Bociurkiw who planned to adopt a teenager, the young woman, Cindi, left three months after moving in. Marusya who is an associate professor at Ryerson University, acknowledges in “Attachment Roulette” what she taught Cindi and what Cindi taught her.

Another adoption story is Patrice Leung’s “Pathway.” It was the early 2000s when Patrice, a single lesbian, travelled to China with her sister to adopt her first daughter. She had been told that the Chinese government required a notarized declaration that she wasn’t a homosexual. “Our first few years together were so arduous I felt sorry for us both,” Patrice says of herself and her daughter Keala. She realized Keala needed an ally and Patrice went back for daughter number two, Tasia.

Susan G. Cole is a name I know from my Toronto days. She is a writer, editor and activist whose play, A Fertile Imagination about two lesbians trying to have a […]

Destination Unknown is the theme of the women’s writing circles I’m offering in Nanaimo this summer: a writing journey of practice, discovery and possibility. We don’t know where we’ll end up when we begin to write and that’s what makes it all the more fascinating. As poet, essayist and writing teacher Roger Housden says: “The destination is only ever the next step.”

The circles will take place in the living room of the Two Cat Be & Be, our home in Nanaimo, so named because we have two cats. Or, we may be outside in the courtyard garden which right now is full of various coloured rhododendrons. I’ve always loved courtyard gardens whether at the centre of monasteries or Spanish-style houses such as the ones I saw when I visited Turkey. Ours doesn’t have brick walls around it but it does feel enclosed because of its situation on the property and all the trees and flowers surrounding it.

The rhododendrons and golden chain tree will have faded by July but there will be the mulberry tree, the hazelnut, the pink lavatera and purple butterfly bush. And the patio is being expanded so we have an area in which to sit and get to one another through our writing.

The writing circles are a way to sustain your writing practice throughout the summer. Without the same sorts of routines and schedules in the summer, it’s easy to let the various practices that keep us connected to ourselves, fall by the wayside. We bring however we are feeling to the circle and find through listening, writing and having a voice, we’re able to feel inspired and grateful. Whether you want to explore poetry, fiction, journal writing or other forms […]

And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river
I don’t know how or when . . .

wrote Pablo Neruda in his poem “Poetry.” Margaret Atwood said it too. Poetry arrived for her one day as she crossed the football field at the University of Toronto. Winnie the Pooh said it this way: “It’s easiest when you let things come.”

I joined the famous and the fictional when a decades-old memory urged itself onto paper almost thirty years ago. The memory began as an image. Then it was a feeling. The lines appeared effortlessly once I wrote the first line down.

When I see a man standing at a drugstore perfume counter
I know he has put off buying a gift for too long
until all the other stores are closed
except the drugstore open until midnight.

(from “Open Until Midnight,” When My Heart is Open, a CD of poems, Flying Mermaids Studio, 1999, cover art by Maria Pezzano, graphic design by Sarah Clark)

That drugstore scene had occurred many years before and the memory appeared to me to be the man’s longing to please. I saw the little boy in him. I remembered the little girl in me and my own attempts at giving a gift to my mother. I remembered Evening in Paris and its blue bottle. I remembered my son and the unfamiliar territory we entered when I left my marriage and our family. We all felt raw. In new places.

Once I had expressed the feelings in response to that drugstore scene, I let them go. I was saved from carrying the longings and regrets, inside. It doesn’t mean […]

Susan McCaslin and J. S. (John) Porter, poets and Merton scholars, offer a fresh and fully embodied study of Thomas Merton in their book Superabundantly Alive: Thomas Merton’s Dance with the Feminine (Wood Lake Publishing, 2018).

Merton, a Trappist monk who died in Bangkok, Thailand in 1968, was described as “superabundantly alive” by his friend Robert Lax. The book, Superabundantly Alive, with its insights and inquiry, was a joy to read.

Poems by both McCaslin and Porter open the book and are followed by McCaslin’s essay about her discovery of Merton’s work in 1968. She considers the late monk a spiritual mentor, “an imperfect pilgrim on the path to integral being. Increasingly, contemplation and action became his yin and yang, inseparable and complementary.”

McCaslin says: “Poetry seems to be Merton’s primary means of healing and transformation.” She studied Merton’s prose poem, “Hagia Sophia,” which is centered on the feminine divine and considers it his master work.

Porter, in his enlightening essay, “The Unbroken Alphabet of Thomas Merton,” explores the “key letters” in Merton’s alphabet such as J for journals and W for writer.

“Journals are a form of autobiography for Merton,” as Porter points out, “a way of keeping track of his days and preserving ideas and experiences that are important to him.” As for writing, Merton linked it to love and wrote: “For to write is to love: it is to inquire and to praise, or to confess, or to appeal.”

McCaslin and Porter have a dialogue entitled “The Divine and Embodied Feminine” in which McCaslin says: “The feminine for Merton is gentle, soft, fierce, strong, wild, and evolutionary. . . His God is masculine, feminine, liminal, androgynous, and mysterious beyond all our constructed categories.”

“Yes. Beautifully put.” Porter replies.

Another […]

When Titia Jetten introduced Sheila Norgate at a recent panel discussion in Ladysmith, Titia quoted Sheila from her website on the subject of risk. [Photo of Heart Tamer at Work by Sheila Norgate]

People often ask me questions like how did I become an artist, and when did I first know I was one, and how long did it take to paint that piece there, and do I work every day, and do I ever feel like quitting, and do I ever feel like never quitting.

These questions are fairly easy to answer.

The tougher ones live in the suburbs of reason. Ones like why does an artist answer the call, and who exactly is calling, and why would anyone give up things like fiscal certainty to make marks, and who exactly makes the marks.

All I can say is that it has something to do with risk, and how at some point for me, the risk of flying without a net finally became smaller than the risk of never having flown at all.

The theme of the panel discussion was “Creativity & Commerce: Strange Bedfellows” put on by the Ladysmith Waterfront Gallery. The location was Aggie Hall in Ladysmith as there was damage to the art gallery during the December 20th windstorm. I was drawn to the subject as it also affects writers and I expect I’ll muse more about that in my next blog.

Nixie Barton and Grant Leier were the other two visual artists who were part of the panel. In her introduction, Titia pointed out that Grant gets up at 5 a.m. and paints 72 to 80 hours a week.

I first met Sheila in Toronto some time in the nineties when she was selling her […]