The authors of Lytton: Climate Change, Colonialism and Life Before the Fire (Penguin Random House, 2024) have written a beautifully readable history of the town that holds many fond memories for them. There are probably many who didn’t know of British Columbia’s hot spot, where the Fraser and Thompson Rivers meet, until they heard of the devastating wildfire in June 2021 that burned Lytton to the ground.

Peter Edwards, organized-crime journalist and author of seventeen non-fiction books, spent his childhood in Lytton. Although only about 500 people lived in Lytton, Peter liked to joke “that he was the second best writer to come from his tiny hometown.” As he says: “We were unaware as children of the horrors that existed for other children who were starting their lives nearby. We almost never saw any kids from St. George’s Residential School, set on farmland just four kilometres from my home.”

Co-author Kevin Loring, a Nlaka’pamux from Lytton First Nation, grew up to be a Governor General’s Award-winning playwright. He comes from the Loring family from Botanie Valley and the Adams of Snake Flat. As he says, “Lytton is about the size of a city block. The rez at the end of town makes it feel a bit bigger, but not by much.”

“The story of this special place at the heart of the Nlaka’pamux Nation is many thousands of years old,” Kevin writes. His family comes from the early settlers who arrived during the gold rush and the Nlaka’pamux, “who have always called this place home.” His people called Lytton, ItKumcheen, “meaning, in essence, ‘where the rivers meet’ or, as I was told, ‘the place inside the heart where the blood mixes’.”

The name Lytton was chosen by Sir James Douglas out of respect for his boss Dr. Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, Secretary of State for the Colonies. Bulwer-Lytton was the author of the infamous line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Newly arrived Americans during the gold rush which jeopardized the Nlaka’pamux salmon fishery, used the name “The Forks” among others rather than ItKumcheen.

“This place that had been the centre of the Nlaka’pamux universe for millennia was changing, much too quickly for the liking of Chief Cexpen’nthlEm.” He became Chief of the Nlaka’pamux in 1850 and was “at the peak of his influence in 1858.”

Peter Edwards / Photo by Denise Grant

Rather than strictly chronological, the book’s forty-one chapters focus on themes such as Gold Fever, Promise of Railway, Residential School Revelations, Battle for the Stein Valley, and Climate Change. Interspersed throughout are Peter Edwards’  and Kevin Loring’s memories of this special place.

While the book describes serious themes such as the environment, the legacy of colonialism and Indigenous rights, the authors want readers “to be moved to laugh and cry and appreciate a community worthy of your attention.” Indeed, the book lives up to their intentions.

In the chapter, “Promise of Railway,” the authors write that “Little Lytton soon had its own Chinatown.” First Nations people had guided Chinese prospectors to goldfields during the gold rush so bonds already existed between Chinese and First Nations people when rail workers arrived from China. “More than a thousand Chinese miners may have arrived between 1860 and 1863.”

Chicago engineer and contractor Andrew Onderdonk supervised the construction of 544 kilometres of the transcontinental railway and needed ten thousand men for the job. Two thousand Chinese workers sailed form Hong Kong to Victoria on crowded three-masted ships. Then 6,500 more Chinese workers were brought in and were paid less than half the rate of white workers. They were given the most dangerous jobs and “an estimated four Chinese workers died for each mile of track up the canyon.”

A cantilever bridge was completed in 1882, the first of its kind in North America, “one of the great wonders of the C.P. Railway.” Once construction of the railway was complete, the CPR laid off thousands of Chinese workers. Some moved into caves near neighbouring Spences Bridge and others went to Vancouver. “The 1891 census recorded only twelve Chinese names left in Lytton.”

James Alexander Teit, from the Shetland Islands of Scotland, became an “anthropologist friend” to the Nlaka’pamux and learned to talk with them in their own tongue. To earn a living, he acted as a guide for American and European big-game hunters. One of the expeditions he led was in September 1894 for wealthy Chicago engineer Homer E. Sargeant who began to fund Teit’s research and did so until Teit’s death in 1922.

Teit became involved with helping First Nations leaders protect their land and “distilled the intentions, grievances and concerns of the gathered Indigenous leaders into a document now known as the Laurier Memorial.” The leaders had gathered for two weeks at Spences Bridge and Teit delivered their message to Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier at a campaign stop in Kamloops. An excerpt from the Laurier Memorial begins the chapter “Anthropologist Friend”: “We condemn the whole policy of the BC government towards the Indian tribes of this country as utterly unjust, shameful and blundering in every way.”

Kevin writes that Teit’s field notes about the Nlaka’pamux were instrumental in his journey to understanding his cultural practice and history. “Given the loss of traditional knowledge due to the residential schools, his richly detailed notes remain some of the most important insights to our past that we have. Years later, his work informs my community-based art practice.”

“No group that had arrived in the past century was having more impact than the New England Company,” the authors say in their chapter “Entering the Twentieth Century.” It was Anglican missionaries from the New England Company who set up the Lytton Indian Boys’ Industrial school which would later become known as St. George’s Indian Boys’ School.

Built in 1901, St. George’s became part of the cross-country residential school program “that took more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from their families, beginning in the 1870s and continuing for more than a century, through to the 1990s.”

Reverend George Ditchman’s “reign of cruelty” ended in May 1911 and with Leonard Dawn installed as the school’s second principal, Indigenous boys still fled the school, the authors say in “Suffering Little Children.”

Girls were transferred from All Hallows’ West in Yale to St. George’s which in 1920 had ninety-five students. The government in Ottawa had passed a residential school policy in 1920 which made attendance compulsory for First Nations children aged seven to fifteen. Reverend Louis Laronde was appointed principal. He would confess to “gross familiarity” with the girls but not for the paternity of a student’s child.

Reverend A. R. Lett arrived at the school in 1923 with his wife (Florence) and baby (Marjorie) “as well as high hopes of cleaning up the ongoing mess.” I have done some research into Adam Ralph Lett as he was my great uncle. In 1994, I visited the site of the former St. George’s Residential School in Lytton (the main building burned down in 1982) and did some research at the Anglican Archives in Kamloops. The book, Lytton, has told me much more about the conditions at the time when Reverend Lett found the students poorly fed and clothed and his wife worked in the school as a matron.

While Lett had some experience with farming and had high hopes for the school and its students, the dorms remained overcrowded with “a moral problem” according to Lett, defective heating and ventilation. A doctor in 1927 reported that “thirteen children had died at St. George’s from flu and mumps and there were numerous cases of tuberculosis.”

in the spring of 1933, Lett suffered a breakdown and continued to live “on nerve pills.” In the winter of 1936–37, 152 students suffered measles and whooping cough. Influenza killed thirteen students “while striking 170 more, as well as eleven staff members and four nurses.”

Lett was replaced in 1942. He lived until 1960 and while he may have had contact with his sister, my maternal grandmother who died in 1957, and perhaps his other sister Cecilia, I never met him. My mother, in 1994 when I planned to go to Lytton (we both lived in Toronto at the time), said she hoped Uncle Adam’s school was one of the “good ones.” There were no good ones.

As The Honourable Murray Sinclair, Chief Commissioner of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada said in his report that included St. George’s in Lytton: “The government used coercion to get the children into the school – and then failed to protect them from neglect, disease, overwork, and abuse. This was the residential school system in operation.”

In “Residential School Revelations,” the authors tell the horrific story of rape, beatings and torture at the hands of Derek Clarke, a dormitory supervisor, and Anthony William Harding, the principal of St. George’s Residential School. Clarke arrived at the school in November 1965. It was in 1987, that Terry Aleck of the Lytton area told his story of abuse to the local RCMP.

Clarke lived in a room off the dormitory. He inspected the boys after they bathed, had his favourite students come to his room, where he had an extensive record collection, and fondled children under their blankets in the main dormitory.

Clarke’s crimes were not investigated until 1987, fourteen years after he left St. George’s. “His initial conviction was for sexual assaults on seventeen different boys, aged between nine and eleven.” The trial judge concluded that Clarke had committed at least 140 illegal sexual encounters, “adding that the real number might be as high as 700.”

Derek Clarke was sentenced to twelve years in prison with two years added when a character witness reported that her son had been molested too. He went to prison in May 1989 at age fifty-two.
There were those who knew of the abuse and did nothing. One of them was Joe Chute who had been the principal of Lytton Elementary for thirty-five years and another fourteen years as mayor of Lytton. He had been a member of the local Anglican church and his friends included Reverend Harding, principal of St. George’s. He heard accounts directly from the boys who had been victims of abuse and didn’t call the police, the boys’ parents or arrange for any further investigation.

Terry Aleck, “the first of the seven former students who provided accounts of abuse at the hands of Clarke and Harding,” refused to settle out of court. He was “successful” in his pursuit of justice against his abusers, the Anglican Church and the federal government in Aleck et al. v. Clarke et al, 2001 B.C.S.C., 1177. He also wanted an apology “from the guy who runs this country.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized on behalf of Canada, in the House of Commons on June 11, 2008, for the atrocities committed at the residential schools against Indigenous children including those at St. George’s in Lytton.

Kevin Loring / Photo by Ian Redd

Kevin Loring’s play, Where the Blood Mixes, set in Lytton, deals with the intergenerational trauma from St. George’s Residential school. It premiered on the day of the prime minister’s apology. Terry Aleck has been a mentor to Kevin throughout his life. “His brave work helped open the door for other survivors to share their stories, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.”

Terry Coyote Aleck is one of the elders honoured in a documentary film entitled s-yéwyáw / AWAKEN co-written and co-produced by my long-time friend Liz Marshall who was also executive producer, one of the cinematographers and directed the film. (You can livestream the film at Telus Originals or knowledge.ca.)

Ruby Dunstan escaped from St. George’s as a thirteen-year-old as she had been punished for speaking her Indigenous language. She went on to become a social worker and the first female chief of Lytton First Nation. Chief Dunstan successfully fought clear-cut logging in the sacred Stein Valley and “helped set up the band-operated Stein Valley Nlaka’pamux School, serving as school board president.”

The Stein Valley is a sacred place to the Lytton Nlaka’pamux and Mount Currie Lil’wat peoples, “a site of medicine and food gathering, vision seeking and cleansing.” As Chief Ruby Dunstan told the Wilderness Advisory Committee in 1985, “This valley is Indian land.”

“Ever since the gold rush, the Nlaka’pamux have been fighting for sovereignty over their lands, and against colonialism and erasure. When the environmentalists came into the community, they too began to talk as though they had authority over the land and could speak on behalf of the future.”

Whether well-intentioned or not, “Chief Ruby Dunstan made it clear that they were not going to be spoken over by shamas, (a derogatory term for white people).”

Lytton had already been known as “Canada’s hot spot” when it set a new world record on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 of 49.6 C as reported by Environment Canada. It was the highest temperature ever recorded above latitude 45 N.

Lost to the wildfire that had begun on June 17, 2021 with a fire reported seven kilometres south of Lytton, were 124 structures in the village of Lytton and 45 in the adjacent Lytton First Nation as well as 34 nearby rural properties. Ninety percent of the local buildings “had been ruined in a flash.” Jeanette and Michael Chapman who sought safety in a trench on their property, were two fatalities of the fire.

Many people sought refuge in Lytton through the years. As the book describes: “In modern times many outsiders would seek shelter there, often people who just didn’t fit anywhere else and were hoping for a little anonymity in the mountains.” Buddhists set up a temple just outside town as they shared the Nlkaka’pamux view of Lytton as “The Centre of the World.” A year following the devastating fire, the monks from the Lions Gate Buddhist Priory held a memorial for animals lost in the fire.

One of the structures destroyed was the Lytton Chinese History Museum which opened in 2017 by Lorna Fandrick when she discovered a Chinese joss house (temple) had occupied the lot in the past. (The original had been built in 1881.) She wanted to commemorate the work, sacrifices, and contributions made by thousands of Chinese labourers. Most of the 1600 artifacts in the museum were destroyed; a few pottery and ceramic pieces survived.

Fandrick hopes to rebuild the Chinese History Museum. A CBC report said: “She plans to focus the new museum around a digital concept, as she has kept a database of all of the items in the museum.”

Among the photos included in the book is one of Tricia Thorpe and Don Glasgow’s reconstructed house, during construction and at completion. “They’re optimistic that their community is worth rebuilding again.”

The smell of the seasons in the canyon, the wind, the
rivers, the mountains. The sound of the coyotes howling
on the west side on cold winter nights. The rhythm
of the trains rumbling by. The big trucks buzzing by on
the Trans-Canada Highway. I played here, learned here,
loved here. My history is here, on these streets, buried
in this ground.

Kevin Loring

An art exhibit entitled “Threadbare” opened on September 20 at the View Gallery at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo. Connie Michele Morey is an artist who witnessed the ecological loss from the wildfire in Lytton. Her mixed media exhibit includes stitchwork, embroidery, sculpture, photography, stop-motion, and performance. According to a press release, “Threadbare explores the effects of colonial industries on interspecies displacement and ecological loss.”

Morey has been visiting Lytton since 2016 and started her project in a cabin north of town. After Lytton was devastated by wildfire in 2021, Morey returned and took photos that became a basis for her art exhibit.

“The exhibition … consists of 12 bodies of work that navigate the tension between perceptions of interspecies relations as exploitable resources and the longing for familial relations,” the artist said in a press release. “Threadbare” is on until November 1, 2024.

In one of her essays, “Virginia Woolf’s Commas” in the “Late” section of A Life in Pieces (Thistledown Press, 2024), Jo-Ann Wallace writes of typing Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway “from beginning to end.”

“There is something surprisingly intimate about entering text in this way,” Wallace says of her approach to preparing a scholarly edition of the 1925 novel for Broadview Press. While typing, Wallace learned “something about the minutiae of Woolf’s style, and in particular, her often eccentric use of commas, semi-colons, and other punctuation marks.” She calls herself a “fast and pretty accurate typist” and recalls choosing typing as an option when she was in high school in Montreal in the late 1960s.

Typing relies on muscle memory and as Stephen, her husband pointed out to Wallace: “Language is a kind of music and typing is a way of playing it.”

Jo-Ann Wallace was born in Montreal on June 19, 1953 and died in Victoria, B.C. on June 25, 2024. Her obituary in The Globe and Mail, written by her husband Stephen Slemon I expect, said about her typing out the entire text of Mrs. Dalloway that she “learned something about the interplay between literary imagination and memory . . . “

Wallace had retired as a professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. As her obituary states: “Her scholarship, always feminist in approach, focused on early British modernism, and especially on women whose lives and works did not fit easily into accepted literary critical moulds.”

Her dry humour comes through in her essays as well as being a master “of pointed understatement, of the perfect, capturing phrase.”

A Life in Pieces published on August 26, 2024 is made up of thirty short essays in which Wallace remembers fragments of her life, gains insight, asks questions, and contemplates and appreciates the dayliness at the end of her life.

A memoir by Hilary Montel prompts Wallace’s memory visit (and virtual Google walk) to 43 Leslie Gault in the Ahuntsic neighbourhood of Montreal where she lived as a child. While Mantel refers to “the person you might have been,” Wallace only imagines “my subsequent houses and my subsequent lives. I can only imagine the finality of me, all roads leading here,” she writes in “43 Leslie Gault” in the “Early” section of the book.

Wallace begins her essays in an inviting conversational way such as: “This morning as I emptied the dishwasher . . “ (“Her Bequest”) or “My younger sister Nancy and I shared a room until I was almost ten, which is when we moved to our four-bedroom, split-level house in the suburbs” (“White Swan, Black Swan”).

At times, she shares her writing process and challenges. In “The Light Princess,” named for the 1864 novella-length book by George MacDonald, she thinks of her Great Aunt Amy. (Wallace read the 1969 edition illustrated by Maurice Sendak.)

A child with no gravity and a great aunt who, as a child, “couldn’t stay on the ground.”

“I struggled to find a way to finish this piece about Great Aunt Amy,” she writes. She ends with: “But I like to think that the admirable and unconventional life [Great Aunt Amy] made for herself, floating away from all the expectations she must have felt as a woman of her time and class, gave her a certain buoyant lightness of being.”

Wallace hated high school and educated herself in the reading she chose. In the spring of 1972, she bought the preview issue of Ms. Magazine. She had already read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. She was also reading the early Margaret Drabble, Margaret Atwood, Marie-Claire Blais, and Sylvia Plath she says in her essay “North American Factors,” a company she worked for. (She had quit school after attending a semester at Vanier College.)

“Bit by bit I was putting a world together, a world that had people like me at the centre: young women feeling something, wanting something, just about bursting with something.”

In “Me and Not-Me,” she braids the U.S. Supreme Court 2022 overturning of its own 1973 Roe v. Wade decision with her own abortion. She had held “a series of low-paying jobs” when she dropped out of school. In “an act of unimaginable defiance against my parents” she flew to Labrador to see her boyfriend who had taken a job there. With the help of the internet, Wallace reconstructed her story of seeking out the Montreal Women’s Liberation Movement operating out of the Women’s Centre. The centre managed abortion referral services to Henry Morgentaler’s clinic that had opened the year before.

It was 1970 and Wallace didn’t want to go to “a home for unwed mothers.” She says: “I would not bear a child for someone else.”

Also woven into the story is Wallace’s reading of Happening by Annie Ernaux which is “a harrowing account of her, then illegal, 1963 abortion.” Ernaux was twenty-three when she had an abortion. Wallace wasn’t quite eighteen.

She felt she had been shaped by what Ernaux called the “clandestinity” of abortion and especially of an illegal abortion. “It is something one is alone with. Paradoxically, though, that aloneness also created in me what I now think of as a compulsion to confess.” She isn’t sure if the confessing to any new friend or boyfriend meant she was “motivated by pride in who I was and the decision I made, and not by a desire to be punished. But I don’t know.”

Photo of Jo-Ann Wallace by Stephen Slemon

The essays are so gorgeous in their honesty as well as in their woven themes.

In “Poetry,” one of her longer essays, Wallace tells of her friendship with Dana, a fiction writer, while as a Concordia University student, Wallace thought of herself as a poet. “It was “a good time in which to be an aspiring woman poet in Canada,” Wallace writes. Among the “fearless” Canadian women poets in the seventies, she names Margaret Atwood, Susan Musgrave, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Dorothy Livesay.

Ann Patchett’s Truth & Beauty: A Friendship is the memoir Wallace refers to in which Patchett, a fiction writer primarily, writes of her seventeen-year friendship with poet Lucy Grealy. Published in 2004, it didn’t catch Wallace’s attention at the time. When she did read the book, she found it “deeply unsettling.

With doubts about academic life during her first semester of graduate school, Wallace found her way to “a research program that for me, forged that crucial link between lived lives and the writing they produced.”

That meant that poetry which she considered “a thing of the blood” couldn’t be included. “It couldn’t simply be conjured; it had to tap into some kind of rhythmic insistence. Something about academic work, for me, blocked that force.”

A “lacuna” in Patchett’s and Grealy’s friendship lasted several weeks while for Wallace and Dana, it was almost twenty years. During that time Wallace found happiness in a new relationship “with a good man and a nice kid.”

When turning fifty, she went through photo albums and letters that had been stored in the basement. Photos from her first wedding went into the paper shredder. “Bzz bzz bzz.” When she read letters from Dana she realized she was “reading not only personal history but the social history of a generation of young women. So I typed them all up. I’m a fast typist, but it took up a lot of my spare time that summer.”

She found Dana and was able to make contact with her in Toronto; Dana also typed all the letters Wallace had sent to her. “And then it was as if the twenty years evaporated.” They again had a “largely epistolary friendship” although by email.

The essay “Melmac” gives the book its cover image: “Russel Wright residential Melmac cups.”

The “Melmac years” don’t refer to Wallace’s early life but to her life of about twenty years ago when she purchased “an already ancient Class C Motorhome. With its “retro” interior, Melmac seemed well suited to it and to travel and after spotting a couple of old Melmac mugs in a thrift shop, Wallace’s “Melmac obsession” began.

Not that the Melmac years were easy ones for Wallace. She was chairing “a large and complex university department with seventy full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty members, a graduate program with some one hundred and forty students, and an untold number of contract instructors.” Much was accomplished but the workload was “crushing” and she was often sick during those years. She also confesses to buying small figurines from Occupied Japan. She wonders if it was childhood memories of buying a gift for her mother and “the five-and-dime store” or visiting great aunts who had fancy figurines on their coffee tables.

While Wallace questions herself about her obsessions, she determines it wasn’t an addiction. She’s glad she kept the turquoise Russel Wright dinnerware.

“Mrs. Dalloway has accompanied me through the greater part of my adult life, keeping step with me more than forty years,” Wallace says in “This Gaiety Would Have Been Mine.” The title of the essay is from an exchange between the Woolf characters Clarissa and Peter.

The novel “was the ostensible subject of my now very dated doctoral dissertation, which explored the novel through the lens of what we described then as the ‘new’ French feminist theories of the body.”

Wallace was reluctant to have a “full relationship” with Stephen who was a very good friend. She feared as Clarissa did from a relationship with Peter Walsh, “that she will lose the privacy of the soul, though she later wonders whether, in making the sensible decision, she has lost something else.”

“In words very unlike any that [Clarissa] would use, I came to a different conclusion. ‘Oh, fuck it,’ I thought. ‘Let’s just do it.’ “

Wallace and Stephen were married in the living room of their small bungalow. They talk to each other “all day long. We even text from room to room. This is gaiety, of a fashion. And it is mine.”

While she doesn’t want to think further about her “dusty, bound copy of my dissertation,” she says Mrs. Dalloway turned out to be a happy choice. “Over the years, I have taught it, reread it, researched it deeply, and repeatedly turned to it to find expression for something I am going through.”

After twenty-eight years in her office, her “academic home,” Wallace decided what to toss out and what to keep as she describes in “I Don’t Care About This Anymore.”

“My fat teaching file on Ezra Pound went straight into the recycling bin. There you go, you old fascist; I’ll never have to think about you again.” The poetry stayed and the Bloomsbury as well as literary biographies (except Ezra Pound’s), all of D. H. Lawrence (“even though he desperately wanted to have the heart of a fascist”), all of Doris Lessing and “my battered old copy of The Second Sex, of course.”

Here’s another example of her sense of humour: “I read an early version of this little essay to Stephen. The bastard quoted Ezra Pound to me: ‘What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross.’

Following “the usual battery of tests” with a new doctor, an MRI would reveal that Wallace had colorectal cancer. “Not curable but it was treatable, the treatment aimed at quality of life.”

She was twenty months into the “chemo-lite” or “maintenance chemo” when she wrote the essay entitled “Cancer in the Time of COVID (Summer 2022)”

“Cancer has made me realize that my ordinary, daily life is my bucket list.” She developed some mantras to help her: “Take one day at a time. Practice equanimity. Live neither in hope nor despair. Live as if I’m going to live, while accepting that I’m not. This means, among other things, planting bulbs in the fall. Cancer in the time of COVID has freed me to live my ordinary life, not heroically, not engaged in a courageous battle: just living. After all, I’m alive until I’m not.”

Her final essay is entitled “Mars,” about the Earth’s “little sister planet.” She has a deep yearning to go there. Her ponderings about Mars lead Wallace to realize that most of her life “I’ve harboured a kind of fantasy that when you die, the mysteries of the universe become clear. It’s not so much that the mysteries are revealed as that you just know . . . .I’m hardly alone in desiring this, but somehow the two fantasies – that the nature of the universe reveals itself, and that one’s dogs are there – seem compatible. It is, after all, a friendly, homely universe.”

We can celebrate Jo-Ann Wallace’s memoir along with those who knew her as she has done what her research led her to: forging a crucial link between the lived lives of women and the writing they produced. It seems to me, Wallace’s essays can also be described by what she thought of poetry: “a thing of the blood.”

Barbara Black’s new book, Little Fortified Stories (Caitlin Press, 2024) has won a 2024 Firebird Book Award in the “Short Story” category as well as in the new “Weird Book Genre” category. How cool is that!

In fact, Barbara’s short fiction included in Little Fortified Stories has won numerous awards. Here’s to Barbara’s experiments in brevity that feature convention-defying characters and curious, magical mini-worlds!

Following a visit to a “dimly lit Port Wine House in an eighteenth-century palace in the Bairro Alto district of Lisbon,” Barbara sampled Portugal’s most famous spirit: port. Each small glass, Barbara found, contained a unique taste and aroma as well as a story. “A little story, its words fortified by voices and images rising as if in a séance, from a very particular Portuguese spirit.”

Spirits continued to ignite Barbara’s stories as well as the spirits of ancestors and poets; music; travel; artwork; and dreams.

“Distillations,” the first part of the book has sections on Port, Gin, Bourbon, Tequila, Scotch, Rum, and Whiskey.

Barbara writes of Portugal’s famous poet in “Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa.” The piece begins with Vista Alegre 20 anos, Porto Branco.

Pessoa wrote in over a hundred different alter egos or heteronyms. The page-long piece ends with: “The old trunk full of unfinished writings sits on the dock. In the light of day, somebody will find it.” Perhaps Barbara has found that old trunk or else her imagination has soared with a trunk of her own creation. I think it’s the latter with an abundance of inspiration from Pessoa. His poetry it has been said is “a testament to unreality, proclamation of nothingness, occasion for expectancy.” (Poems of Fernando Pessoa translated and edited by Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown.)

Barbara Black writes short and flash fiction, poetry and libretti. Her debut short story collection, Music from a Strange Planet released in 2021, was a multi-award winner. She lives in Victoria, B.C. where she gardens, writes and rides her trusty Triumph motorcycle.

A Japanese mythological figure called Hitotsume-kozo; a Swedish folk creature, skogsra or “forest spirit;” and Louise Bourgeois’s giant spider sculpture called “Maman” have made their way into distillations in the Gin section. Virginia Woolf makes an appearance in “Stitching.” It’s a “micro-tribute of sorts” to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

“The Map of My Wanderings” (such a great title) was winner of the Federation of BC Writers Literary Contest in 2022. The speaker has difficulty conceiving and tries some unusual methods. Following the doctor’s advice that she lacked faith, she “went home and ate an entire pumpkin, coachmen and all.” The inventive piece, in the Bourbon section, was sparked by a line in Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories from the story “Mrs. D and Her Maids.” Lydia Davis is a master of the short form and we can say the same about Barbara Black whose work has appeared in national and international publications including many anthologies.

The Kraken Black Spiced Rum added spirits to “Playing with Matches,” in which the speaker says:

                                                  . . . . . . . . . . . .  Flames had a way of
accelerating childhood, just as fairy tales were a crude medicine
for confronting reality. Red Riding Hood would have preferred
a purple wool coat with metal buttons, not a cape.

“Ink in a Dye Bath” in “The Unseen” section is a fascinating exploration of colour based on a philosophical proposition by Frank Jackson called The Knowledge Argument. You can see that Barbara’s inspirations are many and varied!

“My Tiny Life” was inspired by a tiny wooden box with a tiny handwritten book inside which was found among Barbara’s father’s belongings after his passing.

I live in this small book of maps and instructions my father
left behind. After all the clocks stopped.

From “THERE IS ANOTHER CANYON VERY FEW PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT,” the fourth section of “My Tiny Life.”

The “Visual Provocations” section has pieces inspired by the work of Hildegard von Bingen (1100s); A.J. Casson (1965); and Frida Kahlo (1940) among others. “Free Divers” was inspired by a photograph of three vintage diving helmets called “Who Was Dr. Halley?” by Susan Smith, 2020. It’s an amusing piece in which there is a Mr. Chang and three identical Mrs. Changs. Or was “the town drunk, Jock” seeing triple today?

“Ancestral Fabrications” particularly interests me as Barbara has written about her ancestry through imaginations, fanciful fabrications, and reimaginings. “The Jaeger Family Theatre,” for instance, is an imagining of Barbara’s maternal Nordic ancestry and the possibility that she is “descended from the (fictitious) jaeger bird people.”

The delightful cover artwork by Barbara probably relates to this piece as it reads: “Picture this: I’m onstage, dressed in jaeger plumage as the letter ‘T,’ my debut as the fifth born.”

I wonder what came first? The fiction or the collage? Sometimes I’ve found that a collage with random selections that you’re drawn to, can help to invent a story. There are several of Barbara’s collages in the book, some of them with the words of a poem. Here’s an example from the end of the Bourbon section. It may relate to “Herring Radio,” Barbara’s “fanciful fabrication of how [her]  maternal great-grandfather and grandmother may have come to be.”

The section entitled “Disorientations,” includes “Kafka’s Dream Diaries,” in which the second of the dreams is dedicated to Tom Sandborn. In his review of Barbara’s short story collection, Music from a Strange Planet, in the Vancouver Sun, Tom said: “Think Kafka on crack.” Barbara found it an “irresistible compliment.” As Franz Kafka has been quoted as saying: “Books are a narcotic.”

The last section of the book, “Fado,” is named for the “deeply felt form of Portuguese music.” As Barbara says: “The unique poetry of fado is based on common themes: Lisbon (or other places) anthropomorphized; nostalgia; grief; voice; destiny; betrayal or loss in love. And saudade, a yearning for the unattainable.”

Black and white photographs are included for each such as “FADO VI” which Barbara has set for voice and piano. (She took all the photographs but one.)

Memory is a rock smashed into pieces. I tell only the best parts,
the sharpest fragments. That canyon of my childhood had an eye
that never closed. . . . .

From FADO VI

On her website, Barbara says: “As a tender youth, everywhere I went I carried my treasured journals. Lined, eight by eleven inches, full of adolescent musings on human life, snatches of poetry, monologues, and story sketches. I wrote in these through university, too, hunched over a coffee in some campus café, a huge cinnamon bun by my side. By then the writing was more serious. Things changed. I now do all my freewriting in tiny unlined 3½ by 5 ½ Moleskine journals. Every poem, lyric, short story or flash story I have created has begun as a deep-dive freewrite in one [of] these teeny coloured, humble books of which I now have forty.”

Don’t you now have the urge to invest in some tiny journals? And have a look as well for tiny boxes and curious looking trunks. And seek out the book of course: Little Fortified Stories.

I offered a summer pop-up women’s Writing Life women’s writing circle recently on the theme of “Inside the Treasure House.” It’s a theme I’ve used before, and thought it a good time to revisit and acknowledge our gifts.

In the circle, we are honoured for who we are and in the midst of busy lives, have a chance to slow down and be with what is. Especially in the chaos of summer, the circle is a welcome place for grounding and centring. (What chaos, you may ask, isn’t everyone at the beach?!)

It was the subject of museums that led me to the theme of “treasure house.”

While our own provenance holds many treasures in the way of gifts, talents, and experience, there are also old wounds, the memories of which rise to the  surface when we are sitting still.

Oh pilgrims on your way to Haaj
Where are you going?

Your Beloved is here
Come back, come back

Did you know, you suffering
is your treasure?

Alas, you are the veil
covering your treasure.

From Rumi’s Gift Oracle Cards by Ari Honarvar (Red Feather, 2018)

“Rather than avoiding suffering, it is through integrating and healing our wound that we become more spacious and more capable adults,” Ari Honarvar writes. “We can then see that gift of suffering for what it truly is. Why do we try so desperately to run away from our treasure? It is time to unveil our Beloved and unite with our true nature.”

During our daily lives, we may have developed mechanisms and habits to protect the wounds. Ari Honarvar says: “We don’t realize that this habit not only prevents the wound from breathing and healing. It also closes us down to life.”

Grief also has a way of being present when we sit still. In the case of my late friend, Andrea Bird, she learned to turn toward living with dying. That’s Andrea in the photo above, taken by Tania Willems, May 2022.

The last handwritten note Andrea sent to me was written on November 16, 2023 in a card called “Now and Forever.” The painting on the card is by Mary Karavos and Andrea, who I called Birdie, underlined the title beside her signature: “Love Birdiebee.”

The “bee” part of her name was because she worked in encaustic also selling wax supplies to other artists. Her teaching had stopped with a cancer diagnosis and her painting slowed down. Birdie did though want to put in a last effort to put her poems into a collection as well as images from a painting she did. The collection became ART/iculate: a light in the dark designed by my partner  my partner Sarah Clark and published under her imprint, house of appleton.

In her November note, Birdie said her younger son Conor had taken her out to lunch the day before. “It was so good to see him & I cried as I told him about the spread to my liver + lungs & also the doc saying ‘months.’ She’s an alarmist but I also trust her judgement, so am letting it in with a dash of salt. Who can say?”

While Birdie wrote about having lunch with her son, she rarely wrote about events – rather about feelings. Sometimes she included a poem by someone else or one she had written. When I still lived in Ontario (almost twenty years ago), Birdie and I led women’s retreats in Elora, Ontario. We’d write in a circle where there was always time for one more poem, create art (including encaustic) from boxes of collage supplies, and we’d dance. Another of Birdie’s names was Dancing Bird.

She lived more than six years following her Stage 4 cancer diagnosis. (It may have been more as Birdie visited Sarah and me in 2016 and it was soon after she went home to Ontario following a great adventure, that she received the diagnosis.)

“I think my beloveds have had me Here for 6 + years (since stg. 4) that I & them have trouble grasping that the end is in sight. During one of my mushroom trips I saw snow on the Grand, as if I were a bird flying over our house & I knew that I had just died & Dan was here on his own & was OK. That’s all I remember,” Birdie wrote in her November note.

Birdie and her husband Dan were waiting for the first now to fall – “again, something tells me I may not see another spring but I’ve felt like this for years now . . . I guess I’m a little in denial, or complacent – But how else am I going to be?”

She was excited to be working on her poetry book as it offered an “alternate focus – even though all the poems are about living with dying.” She was “a little nervous” too and wrote “but it’s a good time. If not now, when?”

In her November note, Birdie made note of Andrea Gibson’s poetry as she had appreciated her long poems plus a “few short zingers, like ‘let your heart break so your spirit doesn’t have to’ or something like that. That’s how I feel these days.”

Birdie had the quote above, right. I just checked it and saw that Andrea Gibson posted a substack in June about the cancer she has been living with, progressing.

Here’s an excerpt from “Untitled” by Andrea Gibson:

But I did not meet this life until I met its brevity.
Did not meet my voice until I knew every word
could be my last. I did not know what prayer was
until I started praying for what I already have.

Birdie sent me handwritten poems in some of her notes. One of them was from May 2021 and began “I know what / unattended sorrow is . . . “ She included it her book ART/iculate: a light in the dark with the title “The song.”

The song

I know what
unatttended sorrow is:
a lump in the throat
we swallow
an ache in the chest
we ignore —
a tendency to
turn away
from what is difficult.

We do this at our peril.

I want to know
what attended sorrow is:
the song of that lump
in the throat,
arising and falling away.
Tending the grief point
beside the heart,
touching
it with mercy

Turning toward.
Turning toward.

Andrea Bird (February 20, 1961 – May 10, 2024)

Birdie was helped by others’ poetry. “The words they spoke settled in me, anchored me to be here and now – inviting me to be present for this life,” she said in her book.

All the images in ART/iculate are from a commissioned painting of Andrea Bird’s called ”The Dance of Life.” She invites readers “into this dance between the words and the art.”

To have a look and to order, you can visit Sarah Clark’s online shop here. 

And as Birdie remembered from our circles together, there’s always time for one more poem. This one is an excerpt:

There is a gift inside you
Do not let it gather dust in a far closet

Unwrap it carefully
With your arms wide open

From “Blood and Honey” by Tanya Evanson (Nouveau Griot, Frontenac House, 2018)

Lynda Barry’s What It Is published in hard cover in 2008 is now out in soft cover (Drawn & Quarterly, 2024). The first edition won the comic industry’s 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work.

What It Is is a wonderful combination of a graphic novel, memoir, lots of collage, drawings, and questions to ponder as if a writing workbook with many tips to spark creativity. To many, the pages may appear chaotic but there is much to glean in this scrapbook of a life.

Comics, music and art saved her, Barry said in an interview with Tom Power on CBC Radio’s Q. Barry is an American cartoonist best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek. She has written illustrated novels and a graphic novel called One! Hundred! Demons! which she terms “autobifictionalography.”

Lynda Barry by Lynda Barry

In July 2016, Barry was inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame. She is currently an Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Creativity at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2020, her work was included in the exhibit “Women in Comics: Looking Forward, Looking Back” at the Society of Illustrators in New York City.

People think they aren’t able to draw as they can’t draw hands or a nose Barry said. In one of her You Tube videos, she shows using a symbol such as an & or # as a nose. That makes it possible and much easier!

What It Is is dedicated to Barry’s teacher Marilyn Frasca. Some pages are like a graphic novel, others are collages, many with yellow lined paper with printing and writing by Barry. Each page invites you to go deeper, between the lines and the images.

There are many questions such as What is an image? Where are images found? What is Where is your imagination? Barry’s “answers” sometimes offer more questions such as What is the past? Where is it located? Each box has an “x” beside everywhere, nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, elsewhere, here. A typewritten slip of paper says:

I know a little cupboard,
With a teeny tiny key,

Barry writes about her childhood when she wanted an imaginary friend. “My parents were not reading people. They worked, shouted, drank, slapped, belted and were broke,” she says.

I love Barry’s down-to-earth approach. All her words and images are an invitation to explore a burning question. There just may be some further insight particularly, through the images chosen.

“An image feels different than thought. It feels somehow alive. If you say your first phone number outloud, you can feel something that is different than saying your phone number now,” she writes.

“We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.”

Barry has drawn an image of her angry-appearing mother, a cigarette in her mouth, taking a copy of Grimms Fairy Tales from little Lynda (or Linda Jean as she was known as a kid). The caption reads: “No more! Give me that! Why do you read it if you know it makes you cry?”

She “started to copy pictures from storybooks and thought it would be good to make my own. I stole paper from school and made little booklets but it seemed I always would ruin them somehow.”

You may also recall ads in the backs of magazines that asked, “Do you have hidden artistic talent?” Barry’s story of copying and drawing is accompanied by her own illustrations with portraits of herself as a ten-year-old with a small bow in her hair and a Bandaid on her knee. In junior high, she copied other people’s art and especially liked to copy comics.

Why write by hand? Barry asks on one of her pages full of handwriting and printing. “There is a state of mind which is not accessible by thinking. It seems to require a participation with something. Something physical we move like a pen like a pencil. Some thing which is in motion ordinary motion like writing the alphabet. . . . “

In high school, Barry’s teacher was Marilyn Frasca, “who, in 1976 was a rather mysterious person. I studied painting with her though she never gave any technical advice beyond once showing me how to sharpen a pencil with a single edge razor blade.” Imagine a teacher smoking a cigarette, looking at your work for a long time and then saying “good”!

Barry says she could “go on trying to explain all that I learned from Marilyn, and how I accidentally became a cartoonist because of it, or I can just show you how to do it. It’s not hard. All you need is a paper and pen and a little bit of time.”

“Lessons” follow the question: “Do you wish you could write?”

“Start with an image” is one of the pieces of advice written on the drawing of an octopus with blue eyes. Actually, it’s a “magic cephalopod.”

“Don’t know what we mean when we say image?” she asks on the next page. She refers again to “your first phone number.”

Another suggestion: “Make a list of the first 10 cars that come to you from early-on in your life.”  Next: “Now choose one that seems vivid to you.” There are further questions to help picture the image of a car “in your mind’s eye.”

You can do the same exercise with nearly any noun Barry says. “Images are attracted to nouns! They also are drawn to verbs and gerunds!”

Imagine the fun students must have in Lynda Barry’s classes. There is fun to be had in her book as well with all sorts of prompts to get you going. She advises having a 3-ring binder and notebook paper ready.

There are several pages of words to cut out, once you’ve photocopied them. Each word is to be put in an envelope and then in a brown paper bag. “Set aside until needed when you’re ready to write.”

And don’t forget images: “Make a picture bag. Start today!” Each picture of “compelling situations, “boring situations,” and “any situations” are to be put in an envelope with the collection put in a bag.

On the last page, Barry says: ‘I owe a great deal to both Marilyn Frasca and Mark Levensky who taught a class called ‘IMAGES’ at The Evergreen State College in 1976-77 that much of this book is based on.” You can’t help but be inspired!