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!

In the photograph taken by my friend Wendy Morisseau, I’m sitting in my living room in Nanaimo where I usually lead women’s writing circles called Writing Life. After many years, I’ll be offering some writing circles again, open to everyone, at Bethlehem Centre in Nanaimo. The setting is a tranquil one on Westwood Lake where we will write together, for the love of it.

The “Writing for the Love of It” circle, is on Monday, November 13, 2023 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. You’ll find a link below for more information and for registering through the Bethlehem website. It will be a New Moon that day so a special time to set an intention for writing for the love of it.

No previous writing experience is necessary, just the desire to explore your rich lived experience and embrace the fullness of the stories from your life. Lunch and snacks are included in the fee which will offer us some social time as a new community of writers. If you’re from out of town and would like to stay overnight the night before at Bethlehem Centre, contact Karley Burrows at guestservices@bethlehemcentre.com or call 250-754-3254 ext 721.

I think of the writing circle as way to gather in a modern interpretation of an ancient practice. We gather around a candle in the centre of the circle so we can share what matters to us.

Here’s a wonderful endorsement from Stephanie Binewych Clark who has been in several of my writing circles in Nanaimo and now that she lives in Ontario, via Zoom:

I’ve attended many of Mary Ann’s circles and look forward to many more. Mary Ann has a depth of knowledge of poetry, writing, and books (she has also reviewed books for the Vancouver Sun for many years). Her circles overflow with tidbits of knowledge, book suggestions, insights into writers and the writing life – wrap it all up and it’s magical. I always leave a circle feeling enriched, enlightened, and lightened, feeling lifted up!

I always feel enriched and enlightened too by sitting in a circle with others, taking time to be with what is and integrating what was.

Here’s a recap and a list of themes we’ll explore in the “Writing for the Love of It” circle open to all:

“Writing for the Love of It” with Mary Ann Moore
Monday, November 13, 2023
9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
at Bethlehem Centre, Nanaimo
To register visit: https://bethlehemcentre.com/program/1807/writing-for-the-love-of-it/

“Writing for the Love of It” is an invitation to experience and create writing as your own spiritual practice. We use the ancient wisdom of the circle to inform a sacred ceremony of writing, sharing and listening to yourself and others. Each participant is respected for their presence and contributions. We will make note of our observations, open ourselves to delights and surprises, and experiment with an inspiring variety of writing forms. No previous writing experience is necessary, just the desire to explore your rich lived experience and embrace the fullness of the stories from your life.

A Space of Your Own: We’ll see how the guidelines for the writing circle can be applied to your own writing practice, such as: Listen with compassion and curiosity avoiding judgement.

A Ceremony of Your Own: We will look at what makes an intentional practice, one that takes us within ourselves as the late Richard Wagamese said.

A Walk of Your Own: Possibilities include a walk around Bethlehem’s labyrinth or a wandering on the land, making note of all that our senses take in.

Daily Practices & Delights of Your Own: We will practice paying attention to what matters to us as individuals, and many surprises may arise.

Creating Boundaries of Your Own: Making room for yourself and protecting your time can be a challenge. We may see that boundaries are where the trickster shows up!

Dreams of Your Own: Making time to imagine all that is possible.

bookmaker
first I fold the mountain
then the valley

The haiku above opens poet and paper artist Terry Ann Carter’s eighth book of poetry, First I Fold The Mountain: A Love Letter to Books (Black Moss Press, 2022). Terry Ann is also a bookmaker and very possibly “a paper queen wearing stars in my hair.”

The quoted line is from “Tearing Down the Papers Just Before Summer,” a poem “after American poet Malachi Black.

Part l of this beautiful collection, Tearing Down the Papers, gets its title, as does the poem, from “an expression that bookmakers use when preparing large sheets of paper for book interiors.”

The poem’s speaker says:

Pulling from my fingertips
so as not to rouse the kitten

this late night meditation on book
making on thoughts of wizardry.

This poem and those that follow, are celebrations of Terry Ann’s creative wizardry and are such a delight to read and see on the page.

“Each gorgeous poem is the pleasure of experiencing a creative life and responding to the wonder of being alive on this earth,” says Micheline Maylor, a poet and past Poet Laureate of Calgary, in one of the book’s endorsements. I very much agree with Micheline.

Other “tearing down” poems in Part 1 include “Tearing Down the American Papers” (after Walt Whitman) and “Tearing Down the Ghost Papers Found in the Bottom Bureau Drawer” (after Emily Dickinson).

One of the poems, “Papery,” is a gorgeous reflection of childhood memories including “my father cuts a square out of a grocery bag.” As for mother: “My mother prefers paper dolls.”

The speaker of the poem says: “I paste over the record covers and create / secret houses for imaginary friends . . “

The poem brings us into the present with:

Today I work in my studio learning mountain valley
folds from a physics professor at Stanford who
teaches advanced origami. I will make a book called
Kitchen Utensils as Sonar Devices: A Handbook
from folded bits of a brown paper bag and three
pieces of thread.

I love the imagination at play here.

“Grimoire” describes something women carried in their apron pockets

small enough to curve fingers around.

A text in code. Some say the grimoire
was for black arts. Magick with a “k”.

Such a small book for casting spells.
Spellbound.

The speaker reflects on “the memory of dark” and “Christmas roses”:

                                     And I bury 
my face in the spell of their 

planting, which I did with you
last summer, your fingers frail

beneath the rotting leaves.
How we enjoyed the day, the dark

falling on our shoulders like rain.
Clouds breaking open like sea water.

While names in the poems can mention faraway places, Panama for instance, and Singapore, “Rock Hunting with Basho on Dallas Road” is close to home. She lives in Victoria.

The poems that celebrate written books are such a pleasure; I’d like to quote from each of them.

How about the unwritten books? I’ve been reading Almost Islands by Stephen Collis about his friendship with poet Phyllis Webb and the poems she didn’t write during the more than two decades before she died – still, she was called a poet. And reading Terry Ann’s book with its second part, The Unwritten Books has me particularly excited.

Terry Ann said in a guest blog she wrote for Richard Osler’s “Recovering Words” that the book, Inventing Imaginary Worlds: from Childhood Play to Adult Creativity Across the Arts by Michele Root-Bernstein, was a “spring board” for this section of her book in particular. She was also inspired and “gathered momentum” from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The library of Babel” about books that have yet to be written.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“This notion set my imagination on fire,” Terry Ann said. [Photo of Terry Ann Carter by Rhonda Ganz]

A beautiful example of a poem from The Unwritten Books section is “Self-Portrait as Things Lost (from The Book of Blue Revelations). There is a profusion of blue in the poem: a “blue door;” “azure skies;” “blue and white willow ware;” “a blue blanket;” and “blue: azul,”

It’s a splendid poem about place, memories of childhood, a “dear husband” and “the searching for / what has gone.”

Here’s one of the stanzas:

Muir was right. It is paradise here. My blue
notebook open once again, across the blue
veined intimate blank of the page. I begin to trace
what has been lost to the dark.

A particularly poignant stanza, a door into the intimacy of a blank page.

There’s some humour in “In Honour of My Visit to Paris.” It’s “from The Brassiere Book” as the speaker has decided “to name my breasts Gertrude (the larger one) / and Alice (the smaller) on the occasion / of a literary tour . . . “

The sparkling mind of Terry Ann Carter wonders what Matisse had for lunch in “Oranges” (from The Book of Firelight).

I have often wondered what Matisse had
for lunch the afternoon he painted Still
Life with Oranges

And then the speaker reminisces about “a first love affair, the city of Montreal” and I find myself humming as a young man strums a guitar: “His voice like Leonard Cohen’s / nudging you with oranges that come all the way / from China . . . “

Part III is entitled night orchids – husband/wife (a dos-a-dos book).

Heather Weston, book artist, author and educator, provides the definition: “The dos-a-dos, from the French for ‘back to back’ binds two books with one cover or case. Although simple in structure, the binding allows the book to be divided into two distinct sections, offering the possibility of introducing contrasting or separate material within one book.”

The poems composed are in the voice of a wife and a husband, struggling with illness. Terry Ann has said: “These poems are based upon my own experience, and the closest I’ve come to writing about my husband’s illness and death.”

There are sub-sections titled wife, and husband.  Here’s a beautifully tender one from wife:

Rehearsal

first night we slept together
after your terminal diagnosis
i learned to stretch my body
like a curve of driftwood up
and down the bed like a loon’s call.
I remember the way you closed
your eyes letting your fingers
touch the pillow and then my hair
as though you were practicing
for the day you would be leaving
for good. as if this were the only thing
that mattered.

In “Compass,” the speaker wonders “who is this man, in bed, next to me, who is he?” and later states: “loneliness is a strange companion, bags always packed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Illustration of one of Terry Ann’s marvelous paper bowls; this one an offering to Pablo Neruda with lines from his poem “Bird”.]

Part IV: The Hanging Books for Kurt Schwitters is named for Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948), a German painter, sculptor, typographer and writer who designed collages and assemblages. In the autumn of 2018, Terry Ann created The Hanging Books for Kurt Schwitters for a book arts exhibition at the Gage Gallery in Victoria, B.C.

The books “were designed from a used paint cloth cut into four strips approximately seven feet tall by two feet wide. The ‘strips’ of paint cloth were collaged with text (in German) of a Goethe poetry collection, rusted nails, old photographs of the Rhine River, bits of handmade paper, matchsticks” and many other found bits and pieces including “lines from poems I had written about Kurt Schwitters.”

You’ll find the words to the four hanging books in First I Fold The Mountain and delightfully, the fourth book is for Anna Blume, Kurt Schwitters “imaginary mistress.”

Part V of First I Fold the Mountain is: Blue Moon – the Ono no Komachi Scroll Books. “Scroll books were the first form of editable record keeping texts, used in Eastern Mediterranean and ancient Egyptian civilizations. Parchment scrolls were used by several early civilizations before the codex, or bound book with pages, was invented by the Romans.”

In 2020, Terry Ann published a chapbook with JackPine Press entitled Blue Moon: the Ono no Komachi Poems. The handbound, handmade book was designed by Heather MacDonald, a fellow book artist and poet friend of Terry Ann’s. (Ono no Komachi, a Japanese poet, was born in 825 AD.)

Here’s a poem to savour from Blue Moon:

From my doorway
I see the seaweed gatherer
doesn’t he know
there is a harvest, here,
in my arms?

Terry Ann Carter’s imagination, explorations, wizardry, quiet contemplations as well as exciting discoveries make First I Fold the Mountain such a treasure. It has filled me with ideas and inspiration and that’s what a good book does. Those of us who have been keen readers since childhood ought to be writing our own love letters to books.

Do ask for a copy of First I Fold The Mountain at your favourite bookstore.

 

 

 

 

I started to get excited by maps in my first grade classroom when Mrs. Lett pulled down the world map in front of the blackboard and used her pointer to show us where we lived: Eganville, Ontario, Canada. Having seen the many possibilities of personal mapmaking since then, I created a memory map of my childhood backyard. I’m remembering maps sketched on serviettes and discovering ways to explore emotions by mapping them. And I’ve mapped my spiritual journey to Turkey, specifically Catal Hoyuk, an ancient site in central Anatolia, Turkey, which has one of world’s oldest authenticated map.

You Are Here

When my partner Sarah and I sold our house in Guelph, Ontario, she drew a map to show Avril, the new owner, where all the neighbours lived. At a gathering at our home, with the map in one hand, Sarah steered Avril to each neighbour to introduce them and show their position on the map of Kirkland Street. The map viewing began with “you are here.”

I wonder if Avril kept her hand drawn map or passed it on to the new owners when she sold the house at 38 Kirkland? Through the years I’ve seen many hand drawn maps on the corners of newspapers, on serviettes and on the backs of cigarette package flaps. Although I haven’t kept a collection I was intrigued to see that someone has.

Kris Harzinski began the Hand Drawn Map Association (HDMA), an archive of maps and other diagrams drawn by hand, when he found a collection of maps people had drawn for him over the years.  He says in the introduction to his book, From Here to There (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010): “The maps had become much more than useful directions from one place to another; they had become accidental records of a moment in time.”

Harzinski began to share his maps and to collect maps from others through his website.  The hand drawn maps record specific details peculiar or particular to a place. Many are maps of directions. Some are “found” maps while others are fictional such as the one Eleanor Davies created to explain a recurring dream to her friends. She calls her map “Newfoundlands” in which there’s no clear distinction between the land and the water. “In the dream she wanders along the coastline of an island, attempting to reach the beginning, only to find the island is constantly morphing and stretching into a never-ending expanse of land.”

 

Memory Map

One of the maps I drew some years ago in a women’s writing circle I was facilitating is what I call a memory map inspired by Hannah Hinchman’s book, A Life in Hand: Creating the Illuminated Journal (Gibbs-Smith 1991).  Hinchman calls her suggested exercise “memory walking” and I found the not-to-scale drawing to be a pleasant recollection of childhood memories. In fact, the exercise is designed as a happy remembering, not a traumatic one.

The details on the map are meant to be those “your child mind stored away.” Hinchman’s example is a winding line with small illustrations and words along it as she recalled what was significant to her as a child. You don’t need to know how to draw and nothing needs to be to scale.

Drawing my memory map took me back to a time when I became a poet – the solitude, the silence, the development of my imagination. I remembered the stories as I drew the map of my childhood backyard where I lived with my maternal grandparents.  The memories all ended up in poems and personal essays.

Beyond the vegetable garden and the pump,
The potato patch and the plum trees,
between the farmers’ wooden fences,
the fields of the valley sing their songs.

From “Ottawa Valley” by Mary Ann Moore included in Those Early Days, Hopeful (Leaf Press, 2010) and Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014).

 

If I were to tell you about my map, I would say:

The bench under the plum trees is where Grandma and Grandpa sit on warm summer evenings. If you walk across the strip of grass, you come to the gravel driveway that leads to the garage. Grandpa changes his car’s oil filter in there.  I play with the stones.

Behind the garage is a woodshed where I play house and behind that, a refuse dump of old tin cans. That’s where I saw a snake one day. At the very bottom of the property looking on to farmers’ fields is a swing.

The vegetable garden, tended by Grandpa, is behind the house. We shared some cucumber there as we sat on the grass and he cut slices off with his pocket knife.

The picnic table behind the house is where I play store with empty boxes and discarded tins. In the winter when a bit of snow mixes with the metal, a particular and strange scent emerges.

Hollyhocks grow up the side of the blue house and sunflowers border the potato patch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Third Dimension

            Titia Jetten, a Nanaimo artist, who, with her husband Robert Plante, has facilitated workshops called The Map, says: “The interesting thing is that a map is in fact a link between dimensions, because it shows a 3D situation in 2D. The reality around you is translated into a compressed form leaving out one dimension. Every map contains secrets, silent information, because the third dimension is hidden in the second. And when you are a good map reader, you are able to ‘read’ the reality pictured in lines and shapes and colours. Unfortunately people nowadays lose the talent to understand a map, ‘read’ the landscape and decipher the hidden information. They follow the voice in their car and lose every sense of place.”

The Oldest Map

I wonder if the people of the ancient village of Catal Hoyuk in central Anatolia (Turkey) were experiencing a mixture of joy and grief as they depicted everyday rituals and drew a map on a wall in one of their dwellings.

What may be the oldest authenticated map in the world is dated to approximately 6000 BCE and was painted on a wall at Catal Hoyuk. The streets and houses of the Neolithic town are shown in rows lying beneath the profile of the mountain of Hazan Dag.  A volcano is part of the wall painting.  It was found in 1963 and is now in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara, Turkey.

In 1998, I was part of a pilgrimage to Turkey called “In the Footsteps of the Goddess.” One of the most significant sites on the tour was Catal Hoyuk. Present day homes in the vicinity are similar to the houses of the ancient site: square with animals roaming around on the flat roofs.

The villagers
of Catal Hoyuk
linked their red ochre handprints
with honeycombs,
painted the palms of others
with seeds
or an egg.

On the eve
of the wedding
in the village of Basmakci,
the women sing,
place a dot of red ochre
on their palms,
the hand of Fatima.

From “Hands” by Mary Ann Moore included in You Are Here (Leaf Press, 2012) and Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014).

Before our tour group went to Catal Hoyuk, we spent the night in private homes in the village of Basmakci where the members of our all-women tour attended a henna party, kina gecesi, where a bride-to-be had her hands hennaed in a special ritual before her wedding the next day.

We also had our hands hennaed so that the next day when we placed our palms on the earth at Catal Hoyuk we were linking our stories, all that we had learned in our modern world, with those hand prints of the people who lived peacefully 8000 years ago. The handprints in red ochre were placed on the walls long before Islam so the hands are as if to say we are here. I have found the symbol of the hand to be an important one to many cultures of the world and a significant connection to one another for thousands of years.

I can’t help but think of the hand prints in dwellings, and on woven rugs for example, as maps of an ancient people. I can look at my own hand and see the past and future there. According to Palmistry or Chiromancy, the “proper” name of divination with the hand, hands tell a tale. There’s a life line, a head line, a heart line and a fate line.  All the lines on our dominant hand show us where we’ve been and where we may be headed.  A map of lines on our hands that also tell the tale of what our occupation may be whether ink-stained or with gritty nails from garden soil or callused hands from holding instruments.

You Are Here

In one of  the women’s writing circles I began to offer in my Toronto living room, we drew our hands noting on them what we wanted to drawn into our lives.  I couldn’t help but think then and now of children placing their hands in finger paint and then on a large pieces of paper to create wrinkled artifacts of red hands in a determined row proclaiming: You are here.

“Schedules as little maps of the possible” Sage Cohen said in her book The Productive Writer (Writer’s Digest Books, 2010). With that description schedules have taken on a whole new meaning.  I create a list for the day, a sort of map, and look through the window to a fine web of fine grey branches against a November sky. I am reminded of the broken veins on my shins like embroidery – or would a crocheted doily be more apt? I think of the words and write them down as a poem about veins, like branches, on my left leg.

If I could look this close
see the shin etchings
before the surgeon has me
lift my pant leg
to declare calligraphy in blue,
I would see the branches
crocheted across the sky,
the November veil,
trace the tiny crab trail,
through the sand ­­­­–
a map, shimmering:
you are here.

 From “You Are Here” by Mary Ann Moore, is included in You Are Here (Leaf Press, 2012) and Fishing for Mermaids (Leaf Press, 2014).

 The Place You Already Are

 I find poetry to be a kind of map as well especially since reading an interview with Jane Hirshfield in an interview in Tricycle magazine (Spring 2006). She said: “Poems are maps to the place where you already are.”

Sarah and I have been discovering a new place that reminds me of living in the country with my grandparents. I’m in a different province now and I’m feeling the expansiveness of the property on which we now live in Nanaimo, B.C. We’re very much “here” learning the names of the trees and the wildflowers, the birds and the butterflies. We’re part of a community with the deer, the rabbits and a bear.

When we meander this newly found place, we take careful
steps around randomly placed daffodils, notice tiny white
flowers we haven’t found a name for yet. Josef has made
birdhouses, assembled cocoons for Mason bees. We know
we’ll find our way back to the work we once did.

From “Mending” by Mary Ann Moore included in Mending (house of appleton, 2023)

Mapping Your Spiritual Journey

I’ve written about my pilgrimage to Turkey in Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey and included the memory map I referred to above in a chapter entitled “Memory Walk”. It’s a digital workbook in full-colour, available from the International Association for Journal Writing (iajw.org). Here’s the link for more information and purchasing. Please note prices are in U.S. funds.

 

 

A Curious Happiness in Small Things (Raven Chapbooks, 2020) – such a perfect title for a book of poetry, especially this book of praise poems by David Haggart.

The poem from which the book takes its title is about the narrator’s ride in the back of a pick-up driven by a woman “near eighty” down the hill on Mt Maxwell Road. Mount Maxwell is on Salt Spring Island, B.C. where David has lived since 2000.

Happiness in small things appears in other poems in the collection too such as “The Truce” about a boy and his Nanny which ends:

I have learned to be grateful
for the least bit of light.

“Moments in Time” describes some natural wonders such as “a polar bear out on the sea ice,” “caribou heading north,” and “a couple of deer delicately picking / their way through a meadow” and ends with:

And last night —
the first adult conversation you have ever had
with your seventeen-year-old granddaughter
how all of this matters
how it all belongs.

There is little punctuation in David’s poems beyond the odd em dash (in place of a comma) and periods at the ends of stanzas. And that works well! One line leads to another, one poems leads to another. As Robert Hilles wrote in his cover endorsement: “Like all great poetry books, you can’t read just one of these poems. You will be drawn in by the compassion and wisdom and after every poem you will want to pause and reflect.”

David’s “wonderful” daughter, Rebecca Hendry, wrote the beautiful preface to the book. She writes: “In this book you will find love songs to his family, to the glory of nature, and to the fierce beauty of the North. You will find fragments of the incredible and the mundane, the mighty and the fragile, and the healing and the trauma that make up our experience as humans.”

Never mind accolades from people we don’t know, it’s the people closest to us who read and appreciate our poems that matters the most.

In his poem “Giants,” David pays tribute to various poets including Bly, Cohen, Atwood, MacEwen, Oliver, Carver and Patrick Lane “who always breaks my heart.”

David Haggart was born in 1949 in Brockville, Ontario. He studied journalism in Toronto and worked all over Canada “from cutting pulp in Nova Scotia to working in the bush in the Arctic, spending a fair amount of time in the Barren Lands – savouring the emptiness there.”

He moved to the Fraser Valley, B.C. in 1983 working construction and silviculture there. In 1988, David successfully “quelled” his lengthy battle with alcoholism only to discover he had “serious mental health issues.”

In the mid nineties, David began to write and attended a Patrick Lane poetry workshop in Sechelt on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. As poet and mentor Patrick advised, David learned to write “by writing.”

David makes note of that advice in his poem “Lane” written after Patrick died in 2019. In the poem, David says following the workshop, he sent “a handful of new poems” and “a copy of a chapbook / I had just published” to Patrick. David writes:

In the letter
I said my only wish
was to write
three beautiful lines
before I died.

He wrote back
lauding the chapbook
with the faint praise it deserved
telling me I had already written the lines
and quoted them back to me —
I have never received a greater gift.

I can appreciate David’s feeling of having received a great gift from his poetry mentor, master poet and teacher Patrick Lane. As the poem was published in recent years and the praise goes back twenty-five years, such a gift has been long lived.

At a gathering on Salt Spring Island recently at the home of Diana Hayes, a poet, photographer and David’s publisher, David read his poem “The Weekend.” It mentions Patrick Lane, also a mentor of mine, and other poets the poem’s narrator will read. The first lines of the first four stanzas are inviting writing prompts I think:

There are things I cannot do . . .
I would give one year of my life . . .
I would like to sing like . .
I would like to find . . .

There are ordinary tasks described (returning books to the library) with a poet’s reflection. The final lines are:

on Monday I will visit a dying man in the hospital
and then go to see my shrink as usual
and read him this poem.

I loved the poem when I heard David read it and love it even more now. As David’s daughter Rebecca says in the preface: “He can hold his sadness close to him, cradle it, turn it over, and look for whys, and yet can be overcome by joy while having a simple meal at a restaurant with his grandchildren where, for a few moments, the light eclipses the darkness.”

A beloved daughter, a respected mentor, a “gifted” psychiatrist have all helped encourage David Haggart’s poems. And as he says in the Acknowledgments: “Thank you also to my publisher, Diana Hayes, without whom there literally would be no book.” Diana Hayes is the publisher of Raven Chapbooks. I thank Diana too for making David’s poems available for many others to read. (David Haggart’s photo is by Diana Hayes.)

Raven Chapbooks is an independent press located on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, founded by Diana Hayes. This family venture first began in the late 1990s as Rainbow Publishers. The press has now turned its focus to poetry chapbooks featuring emerging and established British Columbia poets. A Curious Happiness in Small Things by David Haggart was the first chapbook published by Raven Chapbooks in 2020. To order a copy ($18.), here’s a link to the contact page for Raven Chapbooks: https://www.ravenchapbooks.ca/contact/