by Mary Ann Moore | Oct 7, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
No, this isn’t a blog about money. It’s about rest.
The quote is from Virginia Woolf who wrote in her diary on February 16, 1930: “I would like to lie down and sleep, but feel ashamed. Leonard brushed off his influenza in one day and went about his business feeling ill. But as I was saying, my mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.” (Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Vintage Classics, 2021)
We haven’t learned much since then about rest (Virginia died in 1941) and sometimes it’s illness that has us realize the benefits of rest. And when you take the time to be idle, without being ill, there are indeed many gifts. People often feel guilty when they stop and so push through pain and fatigue as Leonard Woolf did, brushing off his influenza in one day.
Recently I went to see a new physiotherapist (new to me) as my back had clenched up. This was nothing new but I did want to have some advice and support for moving forward and continuing to spend time at the computer writing as well as facilitating Zoom writing circles.
John gave me some exercises for my shoulder and hip and some strengthening exercises for my back. As I’ve worked at a typewriter and computer for about 55 years, my back is definitely in need of support. Ultrasound treatment was helpful and the best advice I received was to lie down four to five times a day for fifteen minutes at a time with my neck supported on a rolled-up towel.
This new practice is my form of meditation. I don’t attempt to read or do anything during these fifteen-minute stretches on my bed. I only do it twice a day now although more often would, I’m sure, be very helpful.
Asha Frost who is a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation in Ontario has had a struggle, in the past, with allowing herself to rest even when diagnosed with Lupus. In her book You Are the Medicine, Asha includes a story of “Why Bear Began to Hibernate.” Bear has a message for us:
You are worthy of rest.
Listen to the messages from your body.
Magic is birthed from the void.
The Great Mystery moves through us, even when it appears that nothing is happening.
Taking a walk around the property where we now live, Sarah and I see many signs of Nature preparing to rest. The little Garry Oak planted this year has brown leaves already knowing in its young state, the need to rest for the winter. The poppies now have bare heads and the alum have shapes like satellites. The leaves of the cottonwood tree are drifting to the ground to crunch underfoot. The Virginia Creeper is a vibrant red, a final performance before resting.
I’ve read essays by modern day essayist Rebecca Solnit who sometimes posts on Facebook. She recently had something to share about rest saying “ creative work too benefits from rest and respite. As a writer I benefit greatly from leaving the work alone and coming back to it fresh, as one does with a relationship; pause, stoppage, inaction, inattention can all be wildly generative, and if they’re not that might be its own kind of fruitful that cannot be measured.”
She continues by saying: “Take refuge in that beautiful stillness in which everything is happening in all the ways that nothing is happening in busyness. Everything happening in the depths, like deep water under a reflective surface, a lake reflecting clouds with schools of fish in the depths. Seeds germinating underground. Sitting still as zazen or just daydreaming or watching clouds is an act of revolt against the shouts that we should be doing something/do more/do more faster that are all around us. If you find that nothing is hard to do, it’s exactly because it’s this kind of revolt against the production/consumption juggernaut that is a kind of war against rest, depth, and the earth. Inaction might be another face of peace in our times with stillness the ceasefire in which spring comes again.”
It’s true that the work and the creator of it benefit from rest and stillness with “everything happening in the depths.”
Poet Jane Hirshfield in an interview with Christian McEwen for her book Sparks from the Anvil: The Smith College Poetry Interviews, says she praises silence rather frequently.
“I praise what happens within silence and the unsaid. And I praise not knowing, abiding in question rather than leaping to what may be a too-easy answer. I also often speak about transition in poetry. In fiction or playwriting, that is absolutely common. But in poetry workshops, it’s relatively rare. I asked my friends about this when I began teaching it, and no one had ever said a word to them about transitions in poetry. For a transition to happen, you need a gap, a little sabbath. I sometimes feel that all wisdom, all newness of insight and experience, lives in the hinges – of poems, of a life.”
So along with the respite we need and the rest the work needs, Jane is referring to transitions made in “a gap, a little sabbath.” Poetry has those “hinges” visible on the page in spaces between stanzas, sometimes between words. Jane is referring to the hinges of a life as well and it’s in those still places that we connect to our own story, our own wisdom and insight.
And prose writers too have used space for readers to take a pause, a rest during to reflect on what we’ve read and perhaps to recall our own story. For example, memoirs by Abigail Thomas are made up of vignettes which sometimes take up only half a page. I’m thinking of one example: Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life (Anchor Books, 2000) in which Abigail has written about pivotal moments in her life including the death of her second husband. As the book’s description says: “This is a book in which silence speaks as eloquently as what is revealed.” Sometimes the passages of prose are as brief as one paragraph on a page. And this is a writer who is fond of napping with her three dogs.
Betsy Warland’s Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Inanna Publications, 2021) broke new ground when it was first published in 2000 by Second Story Press. There is a lot of white space and as Susan Olding notes in her foreword recalling her first reading of the book in 2008: “The space had presence and weight. The space made room for what cannot be said.”
In Chantal Gibson‘s endorsement of Bloodroot, she says: “Read the text. Read the white space. Read the silences in between.”
In the passage by Rebecca Solnit quoted above, she begins: “If you’re sick or injured and healing or growing a new life inside you or just worn out, please notice that that thing known as ‘doing nothing’ is when you’re doing the utterly crucial and precious work of growing and healing and restoring. This also goes for everyone who’s just worn down, exhausted, dispirited, and who’s not that right now? I’m not the Nap Ministry but I’m for the power of rest and the holiness of respite and the you that is your cells and circulatory system and all those inner workings that are so mysterious and necessary and regenerative if we let them be.”
I first heard of the Nap Ministry which “seeks to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism by embracing rest as a form of resistance” in Hannah McGregor’s book: A Sentimental Education (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2022). The Nap Ministry is a project created by Tricia Hersey, “at the intersection of Black feminist thought and disability justice,” who is known as The Nap Bishop, Hannah says in her chapter entitled “Caring Ferociously.”
The late poet Audre Lorde linked self-care to warfare in her 1988 essay collection A Burst of Light. She was living with cancer at the time. “Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me as cutting down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgent, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare.” (As quoted in A Sentimental Education.)
As Hannah McGregor says, Lorde was writing “specifically about self-preservation as a Black lesbian feminist, the refusal to be either forced to live or allowed to die.”
As I thought about rest, many resources came my way hence all the quotes above. And I thought back to the Fall of 2015 when I had an extended rest with cancer treatment and surgery. Having radiation treatments on my shin didn’t prevent me from walking all over Victoria for the five weeks I was there. My form of rest was not needing to accomplish anything while allowing my body to heal.
While some may feel guilty resting, others of us love what we do and so press on regardless. We tend to take our bodies for granted until they complain and we have to take breaks even from the work we love.
Poet and philosopher David Whyte says: in his book Consolations: “We are rested when we let things alone and let ourselves alone, to do what we do best, breathe as the body intended us to breathe, to walk as we were meant to walk, to live with the rhythm of a house and a home, giving and taking through cooking and cleaning. When we give and take in an easy foundational way we are closest to the authentic self, and closest to that self when we are most rested.” (Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, Many Rivers Press, 2015).
It gives one pause to think about our authentic selves as being realized when we are rested.
Kim Rosen, another poet who has learned hundreds of poems by heart as has David Whyte who inspired her, published an essay in August on “The Paradox of a Purposeful Life.” She quotes poet Naomi Shihab Nye who writes:
No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That’s the armor everyone put on
to pretend they a purpose
in the world.
From 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2005)
The pandemic which began in the spring of 2020 forced us to rest (if we weren’t frontline workers). Now we may have to make that decision for ourselves. We don’t need to be busy and productive to value ourselves as it is in fact in the silence and stillness of rest that we can appreciate all of who we are. I believe it was my wise friend Andrea Mathieson who said stillness is the place of balance that inspires.
by Mary Ann Moore | Sep 10, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Eric Maisel who has written over 50 books on writing, creativity and such topics as establishing your own daily practice, and Lynda Monk, writer and director of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW), have gathered an exciting array of contributors for The Great Book of Journaling offering a myriad of innovative approaches to a personal writing practice.
Both Eric and Lynda have contributed chapters to the book. Eric’s is “From Journal to Memoir” which will interest many readers as they think about what to do with their accumulation of journals.
Lynda’s is “The Reflective Journal” in which she outlines “The 5 Steps of Life Source Writing” which she created for “self-care, self-discovery, creativity, and wellness.” Lynda regularly teaches, speaks, and writes on the healing power of personal writing.
The sub-title of the book is “How Journal Writing Can Support a Life of Wellness, Creativity, Meaning and Purpose.” A tall order and I believe the book fulfills its intent. Published by Mango this summer, The Great Book of Journaling features essays by forty of the top journal experts in the world including SARK, Kathleen Adams, Judy Reeves, and Lucia Capacchione.
Those are names you may well recognize as their books have inspired many for years, including me. I feel very honoured to be included in this compendium on journaling, one of my everyday practices. Journaling is the foundation for everything I do.
SARK (Susan Ariel Rainbow Kennedy) invites readers into “Juicy Journaling” in her chapter which encourages writing that “contains all the parts of you – not just the easiest or most attractive parts.”
Everything SARK does is approached through her MicroMOVEment Miracle Method including publishing eighteen bestselling books. She designed the “ignition system” because she “figured I could do just about anything for five minutes.” I’m definitely appreciative of being reminded of this and want to follow some of her prompts for “juicy journaling.”
Kathleen Adams takes a “small and simple” approach in her chapter: “Journaling Simplicity.” Kathleen is the founder and director of the Center for Journal Therapy, Inc. and its two online schools. She has several suggestions for short sprints.
Judy Reeves is one of my fellow IAJW Journal Council members as are many of the contributors to The Great Book of Journaling. I’ve been inspired by Judy’s books on writing including A Writer’s Book of Days.
In Judy’s chapter, “The Storytelling Journal,” are some ideas for organizing your material when rereading old journals . In the “Try This” section, she has many suggestions for enriching “your journal’s storytelling voice.”
In “The Creative Journal,” Lucia Capacchione, an art therapist and early pioneer in journal therapy, shares some Creative Journal Expressive Arts principles and practices. “If you can hold a crayon, you can do this work,” Lucia says. This is a method of drawing or scribbling your feelings with your nondominant hand and dialoguing with it.
Mari L. McCarthy who is the founder and Chief Empowerment Officer of CreateWriteNow has some good ideas in her chapter, “Journaling Basics.” In her “journaling story, “Mari describes a past in which she did not listen to her body until she was diagnosed with MS. She writes: “I learned to tune into my health by beginning to journal every morning without fail.” She suggests you can start small by committing to “writing a single sentence or write for one minute.” You can always do more, if you choose, such as getting “all those jumbled thoughts out of your head and onto the page.”
In “The Writing Body,” Emelie Hill Dittmer, a third-generation survivor of the Holocaust, offers “Try This” points in a recommended order when you plan to write about traumatic events.
The Great Book of Journaling even has a chapter on “Journaling Resistance” by Liz Crocker who is the proud owner of Canada’s oldest children’ bookstore, Woozles, in Halifax.
Merle R. Saferstein trains hospice staff and volunteers to help patients leave their legacies and also works directly with patients at the end of their lives doing the same. In her chapter, “The Legacy Journal,” Merle gives some legacy journaling tips as well as descriptions of the different forms of legacy journaling which include love letters and ethical wills.
Midori Evans is the founder of Midori Creativity, a creativity-coaching business whose chapter is “The Elemental Journal.” Her prompts are related to the four elements of earth, air, fire and water to act as a framework for diving into the stories of our lives.
Mary Ann Burrows, a B.C. artist and writer, contributed “The Forest Journal” which seems ideal for the magnificent forests we enjoy in British Columbia. Mary Ann says: “Trees help wake up our senses and guide us toward the stillness we need to write from, leading us down new pathways of joy.”
Jackee Holder works out of the UK as a coach and coach supervisor. Her chapter is “Journaling to Connect with Nature’s Wisdom.” Jackee says: “In the same way that we can have mentors in people, we can have mentors in trees.”
“Journaling Your Transitions” seems to me to be the very time a journaling practice is necessary. Leia Francisco, author of the chapter, is a board-certified transition coach and author of Writing the Wisdom of Transitions: A Guide for Transforming Life Changes.
I’ve been a fan of Sheila Bender’s work for many years and in “Keeping the Fragmentary Journal,” Sheila offers some exciting prompts for “writing short, writing deep.” She suggests borrowing from other forms such as writing postcard messages to seven different people “from your neighborhood, family, and friendship circle while sitting in different locations in your house, each on the same day but with different messages.”
Writing lists is another good idea of Sheila’s including a list of “5 secrets I hold for others.” Writing recipes is a good prompt too. This is where the fragment aspect comes in: “Needed ingredients are a fragment; instructions for preparing are a fragment; evaluating the outcome is a fragment.”
Imagine a “mixed media” fragmentary journal entry with “fortune cookie messages, snatches of song lyrics, quotes form teachers and parents, or snatches of dialogue you hear.” I’m sure I’ll be returning to Sheila’s chapter!
I was intrigued by Marise Barreiro’s chapter on “Journaling and the Lost Words.” Marise has lived most of her life in the seaside town where she was born “at the Galician Lower Bays” in Spain. She’s an expressive writing facilitator and a Gestalt therapist who is very much in touch with her landscape. As she says: “Living at your birthplace makes you bump into your old self at every turn.”
Marise refers to Robert Macfarlane’s and Jackie Morris’s book The Lost Words in which each poem “is an invocation aiming to bring back one of the words suppressed from the Oxford Junior Dictionary in the 2007 edition, all of them belonging to the natural world that used to be the realm of children.”
She finds the book a “powerful metaphor for journaling because every time we write and reminisce, we reclaim our own lost words, the ones that were deleted and we still ache for.”
I appreciate the fresh insight of this particular chapter and what Marise has to say: “The act of writing itself works as a powerful invocation of a deeper level of personal truth.”
And my essay? It’s what I suggest when you want to leave your solitary journaling and meet with others: “Journaling in Community.”
“Wherever our ancestors lived, they gathered around a fire to tell their stories, honor the passing of each season, and celebrate rites of passage,” I’ve written. I suggest creating a ceremony to write together. As the late Richard Wagamese wrote: “Ceremony . . . is a road to the true nature of our selves.”
I acknowledge my circle teachers Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea and give suggestions for facilitating a journaling circle with a centre, an intentional beginning and end with the reading of a poem, and ideas for writing. “Journaling in a circle where you have created a ceremony offers infinite possibilities as you are seen and heard by companions who witness your writing journey.”
There are so many other chapters in The Great Book of Journaling such as “The Healing Journal” by Jacob Nordby, “The Digital Journal” by Hannah Braime; “The Planning Journal” by Jennifer Britton; “The Audio Journal” by Dwight McNair; “The Conflict Resolution Journal” by Linda Dobson; “Journaling with Children” by Nicolle Nattrass (a Vancouver Islander); “Journaling and Design Inspiration” by Meryl Cook whose rug-hooking designs are inspired by her journal writing; “Journaling to Find Love” by Kim Ades; “Journaling for Personal Growth” by Sandra Marinella; “Journaling for Dream Fulfillment” by Sandra Marinella; “Journaling for Your Future Self” by Elena Greco and several more.
“Trust your writing. Trust yourself,” Lynda Monk says in the conclusion to The Great Book of Journaling where she includes some excerpts from her own journal. “Follow the words and your inner and outer world where they want to go; you never know where you might end up. And that unknown journey of self-discovery is one of the main reasons to journal. Over and over again.”
Quotes excerpted from The Great Book of Journaling with the permission of Raincoast Books.
by Mary Ann Moore | Aug 16, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
I see I did another blog with the same theme and so I’ve added the year to this one. “The circle is open” is something I say at the end of a women’s writing circle:
The circle is open but unbroken
May the love of the goddess
be ever in our hearts
Merry meet and merry part
and merry meet again.
In fact we sing the words when there are women who have been in the circle for a long time and know the words and tune.
I needed to continue offering writing circles throughout the summer for the grounding it offers to me and to others. I mean that literally as well because we walk the land as part of the writing circle which we did for the summer circle with the theme of “All Our Relations.”
I so appreciate Nature’s support for the unfolding journey of each of us and walking the property where I now live has really helped to add to my personal field guide. “Even the stones are storytellers” someone wise once said and we can tell our stories to the stones as well.
I have some women’s writing circles coming up, in person and on Zoom, and hope women, wherever they may be, will consider joining the circle.
An invitation to the Writing Life women’s writing circle
Wednesday, August 24 from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in person, in Nanaimo
Fee: $25
If you’d like to experience a Writing Life women’s writing circle and would like like some respite for a few hours, I’m offering one with the theme of “Writing for the Love of It” at my home in Nanaimo. We’ll take a walk around the property as “A Walk of Your Own” is one of our topics. Have a look here for further information: Writing for the Love of It.
An Invitation to Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice, a women’s writing circle
Tuesday, August 30 from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific time on Zoom
No charge
This is another way to experience a writing circle wherever you live. The Zoom circle is free and I’ll offer you some writing practice topics and we’ll write together, sharing if you’d like to. The inspiration comes from my book Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice. When you sign up, I’ll send you a chart that outlines the seven stages of the Writing Home journey along with references to the seven chakras and affirmations for each. Writing Home is a writing pilgrimage to uncover your story and express your unique voice in the world. Have a look here for further information: Writing Home: a Whole Life Practice.
Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice, a seven-week writing pilgrimage on Zoom
Thursday, September 15 to Thursday, November 3, 2022
10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Pacific time (seven Thursday mornings)
Fee: $350
Embark on a heart-opening and creative journey. Embrace your personal story. Be encouraged and inspired. Envelop yourself with your own wisdom. Live your life from that heart-opening place. Writing Home is a seven-stage writing journey through the chakras during which time I will share readings, poems and printed materials to guide your writing practice. Have a look here for further information: Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice
Writing Life women’s writing circle, in person, in Nanaimo
Wednesday, September 14 to Wednesday, October 19 , 2022
10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. (six Wednesday mornings) +
A Writing Life salon and pot luck lunch on Wednesday, November 2, 2022
Theme: Answering the Call
Fee: $300
In the Writing Life circle, with its guidelines and structure, we create a sense of safety for the memories that may be evoked by a poem, a phrase, a particular topic. Together, we honour the reflections that may be joy-filled or filled with grief as we’ve been called to do. Memories and insights are from a nonlinear realm and the writing and integrating of them can be non-chronological too. The big stories can be told in small, compassionate steps.
No previous writing experience is necessary to join the writing circles. Please contact me to check for availability. Once you have registered, payment is due before the circle begins. The writing circles take place at my home in the Extension/White Rapids area of Nanaimo (except for the Writing Home circles on Zoom). The circle is open . . . .
Have a look here for further information: Writing Life.
by Mary Ann Moore | Jul 31, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Zoe Dickinson, a poet and bookseller from Victoria, B.C., is the 2022 winner of the Raven Chapbooks Contest with intertidal: poems from the littoral zone. It sounds rather erotic doesn’t it, and definitely literary. (Zoe is also Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria.)
As Zoe, whose poetry is rooted in the Pacific coastline, explains: “The littoral zone in a coastal ecosystem ranges from the high-tide mark to the subtidal area, and is defined by the presence of sunlight at the sediment level. This zone of alternating intervals of submergence and exposure is home to abundant life due to plentiful oxygen and nutrients.”
Zoe observes the abundant life of intertidal creatures “on the rocky shores of the Juan de Fuca strait where she delights in the “incredible diversity of life [thriving] in every possible nook and cranny. It is this dynamic world-between-the-tides that spawned these poems.”
Most chapbooks are about twenty pages in length and this one is forty-five beautiful pages. The stunning cover photograph of baby Bull Kelp “growing towards the sun” is by Jackie Hildering, also known as The Marine Detective, an underwater photographer and biology teacher living on northeast Vancouver Island.
Pat Walker designed the book which is a gorgeous tribute to the poems and their subjects. The paper has a smooth finish which makes the book wonderfully tactile. The papers used are described and the main pages are Pacesetter 100# Silk text. (I know at least one person who is interested in paper!)
Illustrations throughout are in black and white as well in colour which add a whole other level of discovery. They’re by Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919) who was a German zoologist, naturalist, physician, marine biologist and artist. “He discovered, described, and named thousands of new species, mapping a genealogical tree relating all life forms and connecting many terms in biology.”
The poems have a beautiful intricacy as well as intimacy in their crafting with a simplicity that is profound in their descriptions of the complex ecology of the Pacific West Coast.
Zoe begins with “I’d like to start by acknowledging” in which she lists a series of acknowledgements of the place “this poem is being written” which is the unceded territories of the Lekwungen speaking peoples. She acknowledges that “my life takes place where someone else’s life should be happening.” She realizes the power of language and of poetry:
. . . if poetry is a way of learning to know the world
then I want my poems
to show this truth
not hide it
and if I’m honest
those are the only two choices.
This is a poet we can trust with her astute observations, knowledge, and a reciprocal relationship with what surrounds her.
The illustration is “Discomedusae” by Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919)
The poet mourns the collapse of starfish and receives advice from anemone. And it’s good advice: “share your flesh with someone / who can appreciate it –“
. . .
spit out what does not serve you–
no point in hanging on
to someone else’s shelf.
(“anemone advice”)
In the poem entitled “the meeting,” it’s exciting when the “orcas come” as the speaker thinks “my feet have touched – at low tide— / the place they are swimming . . . “ She acknowledges their connection.
I was fascinated by the name “nudibranch” when Sarah and I moved to Vancouver Island. Zoe has a “nudibranch” poem in which the speaker declares:
well, that’s one way to deal with fear:
instead of getting harder,
cast off the shell
become all soft underbelly
expose every bit of glowing skin
and dare the world to take a bite
what is armour
but participation
with the predator?
The speaker ends with “teach me to be soft / and inexorable.”
Zoe gives us hope for the human race not only due to her care about and for the shoreline of the Pacific Ocean on Canada’s West Coast. She offers a poem with that title: “hope for the human race” in which the irksome mosquito gets recognized. The narrator lets us know:
how the mosquito’s gaze carries messages
between flowers
after dark
how human blood
becomes a link in this ancient chain
and we
accidentally
nourish a constellation of blooms
is proof that even the worst pest
fulfills a purpose in the ecosystem
despite ourselves
Indeed hopeful, wouldn’t you say?
In the poem entitled “bryozoa” which are commonly known as moss animals living in sedentary colonies (thank you Wikipedia) the narrator reflects on her human self:
. . .
some animals discard shells —
bryozoans
discard bodies
keep the shell,
regrow from the outside in
as though
the space we inhabit
holds our true identity
as though all I’d need
to remake myself
is the indentation
my body leaves in the couch;
that crook
in your neck
where my cheek fits perfectly.
Simply exquisite. You’ll want to read the complete poems yourself and celebrate the poetry of Zoe Dickinson and her love of the “incredible diversity of life” on the rocky shores of Juan de Fuca strait.
Raven Chapbooks is an independent press on Salt Spring Island, British Columbia and an imprint of Rainbow Publishers. Diana Hayes is the publisher and she takes great care in creating beautifully designed chapbooks in small editions. That’s part of her mandate as well as “to support poets by providing a launching pad for wider audiences.”
You can order your own copy of intertidal: poems from the littoral zone, here: https://www.ravenchapbooks.ca/
by Mary Ann Moore | Jul 8, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Lori Fox, based in Whitehorse, Yukon, describes their new book of essays, This Has Always Been a War (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021), as a “scrappy, angry little book” with its sub-title of “The Radicalization of a Working-Class Queer.”
In an interview with Yukon News for which she has been a writer, Lori said: “The book is incredibly vulnerable. I’m incredibly blunt, and really upfront with some very difficult things. And I pull no punches.”
Indeed, there is much to be angry about as Lori describes in their wonderfully written, often visceral, essays. The essays describe their confrontations “with the capitalist patriarchy through their experiences as a queer, non-binary, working-class farmhand, labourer, bartender, bushworker, and road dog . . .” As the book’s cover description says: “Capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our personal, social, economic, and sexual lives.”
It is their work as a journalist that led me to Lori’s book as I’ve very much appreciated their opinion pieces in The Globe and Mail.
The dog on the cover, designed by Jazmin Welch, probably represents Herman who has been by Lori’s side through many hardships and adventures, at lean times sharing a meal of ramen noodles.
This Has Always Been a War is, Lori says, “for my people, the working classes, who cook the meals and pick the fruit, who serve the tables and stock the shelves, who work the gigs and deliver the orders. We are the makers and builders and doers of this world, and all that is in it belongs to us.”
If you don’t already consider the wait staff in the restaurant you visit, or the people who have picked the fruit that you buy at your local grocery store or any number of people who “serve” us, you will have your eyes open to the indignities suffered, the abuse meted out by those in power, and the deplorable conditions people work under when you read this book. Lori Fox has experienced it all first hand.
Lori fights back in the very writing of this book and when they’re able, to physically retaliates. In “At Your Service,” the first essay in the book, Lori is working in an Ottawa pub where a male customer sexually assaults them. Lori upends a pitcher of sixty ounces of cold Molson Canadian over him. Good for you Lori Fox, I said to myself.
The customer who was escorted off the premises, called in the next day “to complain about the quality of service he’d received.” Thankfully, Lori had “hands down the best boss I’ve ever had,” who hung up on the “groper.”
Lori reflects: “As a consumer, he [the customer] felt entitled not only to my service, but to look at, even touch the body committed to that service, because my body (or, at the very least, my feminine attention) was viewed as part of what he’d paid for when he bought that pitcher of Canadian lager.”
From 2003 to 2020, Lori “was employed, more or less continuously in family diners, nightclubs, fine dining establishments, greasy spoons, blue-collar dives” and a whisky bar.
“Capitalism is not simply an economic system, capitalism is culture. Specifically, capitalism is our culture. And under capitalism – within our culture – working-class bodies are property,” Lori writes.
“Feeding people, giving people good food and good drink and a place to sit and talk and laugh, or a place to be alone and have someone take care of them so they can just enjoy and think, is a genuinely beautiful thing,” Lori writes. They note other beautiful things and says: “there are also people who work really, really hard and still don’t have enough to pay the rent and buy groceries.” There are people who can’t afford to take a day off to go to the doctor when they’re sick or go to the dentist because they can’t afford it.
Capitalism is “a system of learned helplessness,” Lori writes. “And it doesn’t have to be this way.”
In “The Happy Family Game,” Lori describes their home life which was a frightening place to be.
“The objective of the Happy Family Game is to create a nuclear family unit which, either in reality or in appearance, looks to outside eyes to be ‘successful in every way including’ doing their moral duty to purchase and enjoy the products and services that capitalism creates.”
When Lori, at twelve years of age, told their mother that their mother’s father had raped them, Lori was told not to tell anyone as if getting their grandfather in “trouble” and “tearing the family apart” would be their responsibility.
“In the Happy Family Game, men are the only players who matter,” Lori writes.
The silence for many who have suffered trauma is worse than the event or assault, in this case, itself. Lori says the event was not spoken of again and they were “made to continue behaving as if nothing had happened.” The family was protected at a child’s expense.
Growing up also meant living with a raging father who she writes about in “Every Little Act of Cruelty.” Lori describes living with him was “like living with a toddler – a 180-pound toddler in charge of the chequebook, with access to firearms.” Following his meltdowns or rages, “in other words, completely insane,” it was if they didn’t happen.
Lori writes: “as an adult and a transmasculine person, someone who occupies the vast and wild country in between man and woman, I am also terribly afraid of becoming him. Of becoming a man like him.” They have inherited physical similarities and other “less tangible traits.” Those intangible traits are: “A tendency toward depression. Chronic, near-crippling anxiety. Panic attacks. Dissociation. Suicidal ideation. Hypervigilance.”
Lori and their brother were kept away from other children, neither visiting them or having them over. Questions could “lead someone to discover the severity of my father’s illness – and his abusive behavior. All this secrecy and misery, all this abuse and suffering, and loneliness, was allowed to continue with one thought in mind: to protect my father, not from himself, which actually would have been useful, but from losing face in the eyes of the world.”
Lori, as a writer, a journalist, as someone who has lived experience as well as information gathered through their own investigative research, wonders why.
“Because my father was a straight white man in a straight white neighbourhood where you did not question the things straight white men did in their homes. A king in his castle. Capitalism needs patriarchy – specifically, it needs a family man headed by a patriarch.”
Lori shares “several truths” about their father including being “a deeply unwell man,” “an unhinged, unstable, misogynistic, violent prick who was a threat to himself and to others,” as well as a “family man who tried his best to provide for his family” and a man “disappointed that his life didn’t turn out the way he’d thought it would.”
I’ve read several memoirs and the horrible conditions people have grown up in makes me wonder how they ever made it to adulthood. One way of surviving as an adult, is to write about what happened, creating a bridge between then and now, putting an end to silence.
Sue William Silverman, author of Because I remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, said about her own memoir writing: “I could hold this book, this tangible thing. And it takes it out of you. It’s like writing that pressure out of the pressure cooker. Each word that comes out is like taking a little piece of pain with it and putting it on the page. Which isn’t to say that you don’t still have feeling about it. Of course you do. But it just takes away a lot of that power it has over you, and you feel a kind of distance towards it.” (from Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art from Trauma by Melanie Brooks)
Lori writes about dystopian novels in their essay “Where the Fuck Are We in Your Dystopia?” Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is included among the ten titles Lori read or primarily consumed as audiobooks, most of them written in the last five years. (They also read Atwood’s The Testaments.)
In one hundred hours of words, “queer people are almost entirely absent.” The works are described as “feminist dystopian fiction” and Lori asks: “For whom is the ‘feminism’ it depicts? How can you have feminism without queer women and non-binary people?” Which leads to the question raised in the title of the essay.
Also, “What is missing, largely, is people of colour and working-class people.”
Lori calls Atwood “a champagne feminist” at best and votes for “the more talented and good-hearted Alice Munro to usurp Atwood as Canada’s Literary Queen.”
The longest essay in the book is “Call You by Your Name” about a relationship Lori had with a man that was complicated, hurtful and as it turned out, abusive. Lori had quit her job and “disappeared into the bush with my truck and camper” after her lover Gabrielle left them.
In an earlier essay referring to the relationship with the man she calls Lucky, “The Hour You Are Most Alone,” (published previously in The Guardian), Lori writes:” I began a relationship with a man who quickly took what little control I had left. Charming and manipulative, he threatened and abused me physically and emotionally, assuming control of my money, curating where I went and who I spoke to. When I had the strength to protest, he battered me down.”
In “Call You By Your Name,” Lori addresses as “you.” I can’t help but see Lori’s situation with the manipulative man as a microcosm of their life in a “capitalist patriarchy.” Even when reaching out for some help to two men in business suits at Whistler, B.c. where Lori was living in her camper and working construction, offered nothing. Lori had been raped by her boyfriend and wondered if the men knew of any hotel rooms that weren’t too expensive. They suggested going home and one said: “ . . . my boyfriend was probably worried about me.”
This is the essay that is visceral and graphic in its descriptions of the abuse meted out and Lori’s physical reactions.
The essay that gives the book its title, “This Has Always Been a War,” is about Lori’s work at a vineyard in Naramata, B.C. where their job was “thinning.” There are several wineries in Naramata on Okanagan Lake “where the houses of the wealthy popped up all in a line on either side of the road, like fairy ring mushrooms.”
At the vineyard, workers “were not to use the indoor washrooms, which had running water, but the green porta johns . . . “. It was financially impossible for workers to live in the village. Earlier in the season, Lori had worked picking cherries for a farm where there was a bunkhouse. The workers who had camped in tents were gone and the farmer offered to let Lori stay on. The bunkhouse had a stove and a fridge but no bathroom. Workers used “porta johns” but they were gone as the workers were gone. Lori used a “President’s Choice Dark Roast coffee tin.”
While hired to do garden work to supplement their meager income, Lori was invited into the house only once by the wife “of a ridiculously wealthy older man who owned several wineries in the area” to use the washroom.
One day, when her employer and her guests were seated outside at a table drinking wine, she spoke to Lori. All kept their distance not offering Lori anything to drink in the heat. One of the women acknowledged it was difficult for workers to find a place to live. Lori said she lived in a tent on one of the farms and before that on a logging road in her truck.
“There needs to be a communal camp for all the workers, so we’d have running water and showers and a place to sleep and cook,” Lori said. Her employer waved her one hand “as if brushing the idea away.”
Lori’s employer said: “Where would we put it that it wouldn’t be in the way? It’s also far too expensive – and the government won’t give us any money for it. We can’t be expected to pay for it ourselves.” That sort of comment makes we want to spit!
As we eat cherries from the Okanagan and drink wine from the same area of B.C., let’s be aware of what it took to get those items to us.
When Lori was last working in Naramata in 2018, they “thought about how it was that a handful of people could have everything, while so many people did not have enough, or anything at all.” The workers in the fields, picking the fruit and cutting the vines, “grew food they didn’t get to eat and made wine they didn’t get to drink.”
There are several paragraphs beginning with “what if” including: “What if working-class people just stopped working?”
“To free ourselves from capitalism might mean violence, but that violence would be – is – self-defence.
“I’m not calling for war. This already a war.
“This has always been a war.”
by Mary Ann Moore | Jun 20, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Writing in community is something I’ve done for a long time – at workshops, retreats and in writing circles I’ve offered since 1997. Even during the pandemic, I facilitated weekly women’s writing circles via email and Zoom. It was a way for us to feel connected, part of a community, and grounded in the midst of it all.
My contributing chapter to a new book that came out last week, The Great Book of Journaling, is “Journaling in Community.” Lynda Monk who is the director of the International Association for Journal Writing (IAJW) and Eric Maisel, author of fifty plus books, are co-editors of the collection. They’re both on the IAJW Journal council as am I.
I’m very pleased to be among the contributors who have inspired my own writing and creativity for many years including SARK, Judy Reeves, Sheila Bender, Kathleen Adams and many others. And I feel especially blessed to have my work supported in the world by Lynda and Eric in the book as well as by Lynda through the IAJW.
As I say in “Journaling in Community,” a ceremony is key for the depth of experience whether on your own or in a circle. “Part of that ceremony is the creation of a container to acknowledge the people in the circle as well as the stories they are writing and giving breath to. It’s a way to create a sense of safety for the stories shared, lessen the anxiety, and honour the people and their stories.”
Here is a link to Mango, the publisher of The Great Book of Journaling. The book is distributed in Canada by Raincoast and you can ask for a copy at your favourite independent bookstore where it’s always fun to browse.
Now that there’s more ventilation indoors and we can meet outside if we choose, I’m looking forward to offering a Writing Life women’s writing circle this summer at our new location in the country. The theme is “All Our Relations.”
Every day Sarah and I walk the land and continue to appreciate spring unfolding with daffodils in the field and blossoms on the plum trees. We’re on five acres so I’m calling it a field rather than a yard. Now there are clumps of daisies in various places, two Golden Chain trees, a flowering dogwood and several varieties of roses.
I made a flower essence from the Golden Chain tree at our last home. The definition is: In Praise of the Small. I always introduce a flower essence or flower essence combination to the writing circle to offer Nature’s support and insight. This one, Golden Chain Tree, Common Labaurnum, supports our own still centre in the midst of overwhelm and helps us appreciate the small in the midst of the magnificent. It encourages a sense of curiosity and wonder for the tiny creatures of the world, small things, and small moments. Here’s a link to more information about the Golden Chain Tree flower essence from Spirit of the Island.
California lilac blooms in our front flower bed along with jasmine, cinquefoil purple irises and lots of lavender. We’re delighted to see rabbits and deer, an eagle occasionally, and although we saw a bear on two occasions, we haven’t seen it lately. I hope it is finding berries to eat as spring as been very reluctant this year.
The property is bordered by fir trees, arbutus and many wild flowers such as small-flowered lupine and bushes of Nootka roses with their beautiful scent.
At the summer writing circle (for four weeks beginning Wednesday, July 27th), we’ll take a walk around the property to connect to “all our relations” and come back to the house, whether inside or out, to write with gratitude, curiosity and possibly surprise. No previous writing experience is necessary to join the circle.
As noted above in the excerpt from “Journaling in Community,” we create a ceremony in the circle and we follow guidelines so as to create some structure in the space to help make it feel safe and welcoming. While you may not set out to write about grief and loss, uncomfortable memories may seep in when you take the time to be still and silent.
When you sit down to write, you may get the sense that your stories have been waiting for you. In the circle, there’s a particular alchemy that takes place when we gather with the intention of tapping into our stories from life and sharing them with witnesses and companions.
If you’d like to know more about the guidelines I follow in the women’s writing circles, you will find them on the same page as the Writing Life Circle info (Wednesday, July 27 to Wednesday, August, 10: 30 a.m. to 1 p.m.) here.
