by Mary Ann Moore | May 1, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Patrick Lane often greeted poets in the reception area of Honeymoon Bay Lodge on Lake Cowichan, Vancouver Island, when he led poetry retreats there. He’d also help carry our luggage to our rooms. I was remembering that about Patrick, who died in March 2019, when I went to a retreat with Lorna Crozier earlier in April 2022.
Patrick Lane was born in Nelson, B.C. in 1939 and grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC interior, primarily in Vernon. He won nearly every literary prize in Canada, received several honorary degrees, and in 2014 became an Officer of the Order of Canada.
When Lorna did a reading on one of the evenings at the retreat in April, she had a few of us read poems from Patrick’s posthumous collection, The Quiet in Me, which she compiled following his death.
Lorna said when putting the poems together for the book, she chose the first and last poems and then figured out, by putting them on the living room floor, which poems belonged beside one another in the collection. It was an intuitive process as she chose poems “that want to slide between the sheets together.”
The first poem in the book is “Living in a Phantom Hut” which begins: “A wolf-hair brush in a yellow jar, a pool at dawn, / Basho on the road to the deep north.”
The speaker in the poem reflects on the Japanese haiku master Basho and notes the Barriere River, one of the main tributaries of the Fraser River in British Columbia. The classic poets and northern B.C. were significant to Patrick’s life and his poetry. And Basho is the name of one of his cats still living as far as I know. (Basho was eighteen in 2017 which is the year noted at the beginning of Lorna’s memoir Through the Garden: A Love Story (with Cats).)
Each line of “Living in a Phantom Hut” says so much about the end of one’s life and the peace that may be found there. “Old misfortunes can bring an old man peace,” the narrator says.
“There is nowhere I can go where I haven’t been” is the second to last line. The poem closes with “when I hold the brush to my ear I hear the moon,” referring back to the master poet Basho.
In the copy of Patrick’s memoir, There is a Season, that he inscribed for me, he has written an inscription to include the last half of a Basho haiku: “We are all the bamboo’s children in the end.”
In the last poem of The Quiet in Me, “Fragments,” the speaker is referring to “woodshed litter, / bits of bark and dust, fragments of fir and hemlock” and then, in the heart of the poem: “a barefoot child lights a fold of paper.”
“Seventy-three years will come to add to his seven,” the speaker says of the boy and he wonders what he can tell him.
In her introduction to The Quiet in Me, Lorna wrote about Patrick’s love of “the creatures and flora of the world.” She said, “as he lay dying, he ached not for himself but for the loss of caribou and whales and owls and salmon. He bemoaned the clearcuts and the forests burning in his home province.”
Patrick wrote of hummingbirds, “bees and the fat birds calling,” cherry blossoms, elephant seals, geese and beetles and eagles mating. A special tree for him was “The Elder Tree” where, as he wrote, “ I come to pray.”
The narrator notes the turtle that “rose/ from the pond’s heavy dark to heal her winter shell” and remembers his father planting trees. “How long ago the fathers, their stories another kind of cure.”
The Quiet in Me was launched on Zoom on April 22, 2022, with Patrick’s long time friend and publisher, Howard White, hosting. The event was organized by ZG Stories and sponsored by Munro’s Books in Victoria.
Friends of Patrick’s read poems and Rhonda Ganz, designer of the magnificent cover of the book, read “The Elder Tree.” She said “I wouldn’t be a poet if it weren’t for Patrick Lane . . . “ She mentioned Lorna Crozier too, with gratitude. Rhonda knew about the particular tree in the poem and Patrick did set out to show her where it was one day but then changed his mind.
Patrick Lane was one of hundreds of writers Howard White published at Harbour Publishing he said in his opening remarks. Howie knew “more of the guy he hung out with” than the poet who he first met in 1974 or thereabouts. He remembers going to the Cecil Hotel bar in Vancouver (demolished in 2011) after one of Patrick’s readings.
Pat, as he was known in those days, moved to Pender Harbour with his partner Carol. Howie and Patrick shot pool, drank together and “got be good friends.” Pat was an easy going guy, Howie said, and an enthusiastic storyteller.
Patrick apparently made some money as a handyman, “slamming together some rough back steps.” After a few years he was building houses. He “packed in the cozy scene in Pender and went on the road again,” Howie said. “Poetry was Patrick’s battleground.”
When I attended poetry retreats with Patrick, I don’t remember him saying: “If you’re going to write, there can’t be a safety net.” That’s what Howie remembers Patrick saying and I appreciate hearing it now. It doesn’t mean he didn’t make money in ways other than publishing his poetry but when he heard that someone he knew was going to get a law degree to support their writing financially, he said, “That’s bullshit.”
Steven Price was nineteen when he met Patrick Lane at the University of Victoria. At that time, Steven thought poetry had to rhyme. He said of Patrick: “He terrified me and electrified me.”
Patrick became a mentor and a friend to Steven who said Patrick Lane was one of the finest human begins he’s ever known. Steven read “Slick” which contains the line: “How hard it is to remember I forget, to forget I remember.” Patrick describes a knife blade as “a sigh, a trout caught in the mountains,/ the flight of willow leaves.”
He was a master of metaphor and a master teacher. So often with we poets at retreats, Patrick would suggest taking out the first few lines of a poem we had written. Or a whole stanza. If we happened to sit with him in the late afternoon, he’d have the typed version in front of him and would draw a pen through the first lines, draw arrows where other lines ought to go and take out most “ofs” and “ands.” At times he had us counting syllables and he always had us listening to the cadence and rhythm of a poem. Our ordinary speech is full of poetry Patrick said. No one talks in sentences.
Esi Edugyan said Patrick was her first teacher when she was seventeen at the University of Victoria. She remembered that in her second year her mother had suddenly passed away and Patrick gave her a bear hug. Esi read “Icebergs off Fogo Island.”
It is the quiet we love, the way water touches us,
the iceberg an animal gone astray in search of time.
The poet reminds us: “The water that is ice is ten thousand years old.”
One of Patrick’s sons, Michael Lane who was born in Vernon, B.C. and lived in Pender Harbour as a young child, chose “Om” to read as he felt it was his father in his final days.
I feel my brittle bones and smile. I am as fragile as winter grass.
I think of leaping to the floor and don’t.
Like my old cat I climb down slowly, accept
the smile of my woman who gives me coffee in the morning.
From “Om” by Patrick Lane
It’s such a gorgeous poem with a mole’s cry, memories of “when we moved / naked in a summer far away” and the Buddhist writing that was a literary influence: “and so the prince set out on the road to discover suffering / and gave his self up at the last.”
Esi Edugyan and Steven Price are both writers and partners and Steven commented on the example of Patrick and Lorna who “believed in each other.”
Patrick’s son, Richard Lane, said his relationship with his dad “didn’t stretch too deeply into poetry.” They spoke about trucks, football and hammers. Patrick’s choice was hammering by hand not with a pneumatic hammer. They talked of hummingbirds a lot so Richard read “Hummingbirds,” the second poem in The Quiet in Me.
Richard also read an except from “Wild Birds” written in the seventies and included in The Collected Poems of Patrick Lane (Harbour Publishing, 2011).
Because the light has paled and the moon
has wandered west and left the night
to the receding sea, we turn into ourselves
and count our solitudes. The change
we might have wished for had we time
To wish is gone. . . .
From “Wild Birds” by Patrick Lane
Later at the Zoom launch, Richard said he could hear his father’s voice in his poetry.
Lorna Crozier said he loved “all of you who are reading tonight.” For the people reading, Patrick was their first teacher. In a way, she said, she had to “channel” Patrick to make a change, delete a poem, add a poem” for The Quiet in Me.
In an article in the Toronto Star (Sat. April 9, 2020, “Celebrating a life of poetry together”), the Books Editor, Deborah Dundas, recounts a conversation she had with Lorna via telephone. Although he had been ill for three years, an illness that went undiagnosed, Lorna said, in the article” “Neither of us knew he was dying.”
In the introduction to The Quiet in Me, Lorna writes: “His calling to poetry began when he was a young man working in the mill towns of British Columbia, and it never left him. About a month before he died, he gave me a folder of poems he’d been working on in the rare moments of grace he found in the midst of an enervating illness. ‘Take a look,’ he said. ‘I think I have a small book here.’ I thought so, too, and as we always did for one another, I made a few editing notes on the pages. He never felt well enough to return to these poems and though most of my comments consisted of one word, ‘Wonderful,” it fell to me after his death to pull the manuscript together and make the final cuts and edits.”
“My heart is close to breaking,” Lorna said following the reading of Patrick’s poems at the Zoom launch . She read “Kinttsugi” meaning “golden repair” which is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mixing lacquer with powdered gold. Lorna said Patrick’s “golden repair was poetry.” And she read “Carefully.”
Carefully
The mole in his small room
moves a small stone
and waits out the rain.
Patrick Lane, The Quiet in Me
Howie read the title poem of the book: “The Quiet in Me.” In the poem, the speaker lifts a man who has fallen to the pavement from his wheelchair and recalls a friend, from “long ago,” a prospector he had lifted to his bed “and dead, / and dead.”
. . . . . . . . . . . the lovers too I laid to rest
in the sleep that follows love, all the arms I’ve held, such arms as will hold me.
from “The Quiet in Me” by Patrick Lane
Lorna wrote in the introduction to The Quiet in Me: “A poet who sang the darkness, he also found music for the enlightened moment in the garden, the turtle in the mud, the cat presenting to his master the body of a mole. In wonder and wisdom, he found the notes and language of love and the deep quiet that he came to in himself.”
As Lorna said at the Zoom launch, the god of Patrick’s understanding was an old tree. The Quiet in Me is dedicated to his children and grandchildren, his beloved students and his life-long friend and poetry publisher Howie White. I’m very grateful to have been one of those students.
Select poems excerpted from The Quiet in Me by Patrick Lane (Lorna Crozier, ed.) 2022, with permission from Harbour Publishing.
Things Will Come to You
The song your grandmother taught you,
the beautiful, the beautiful river
gather with the saints at the river, smooth stones
instruments of silence. Hold one to your temple.
Remember. Hear your true name. Moon, sea,
stone: always listen from the quiet part of you.
Mary Ann Moore
by Mary Ann Moore | Apr 15, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
“I feel unmoored when I’m not writing. Incomplete. Not quite myself.” Those are the words of Elise Valmorbida, author of The Happy Writing Book: Discovering the Positive Power of Creative Writing (Laurence King, 2021).
I definitely relate to what Valmorbida says above, included in her book that is the result of “decades of deliberation and discovery about the art, craft and positive experience of creative writing.”
Valmorbida, who grew up Italian in Australia and lives in London, has been a designer and creative director as well as the author of several books. She continues to teach Creative Writing through various organizations, at literary festivals and community-building organizations.
The Happy Writing Book (not designed by Valmorbida) has a very cheerful design with its orange cover and the large orange numbers that introduce each chapter.
In “Write What You Know?” Valmorbida says “your own experience will inform your work” but points out that authors do research. In the case of Annie Proulx, she “writes what she knows, but she didn’t know it before she started delving.” That delving sounds fun as Proulx “takes herself to new places, haunts little stores and buys heaps of second-hand books about farming, local history, auction records, hunting tackle, whatever. She transcribes wording from street signs and menus and advertising. She hangs about and absorbs conversations, noting the speech patterns, the vernacular, topics of concern.”
“Write to discover what you want to know, Valmorbida says. I like that approach and find it much more fascinating to learn as you go rather than to describe something you already know. Of course, you can write what you remember and approach it in an inventive way. There are many fine examples of doing that including a couple of memoirs I’ve read recently: Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas (considered a “fractured” memoir due to its short chapters written as vignettes from a life) and a more recent book, Persephone’s Children by Rowan McCandless (considered a “mosaic” memoir with the various forms of personal essays used by the author).
In a chapter about procrastination, Valmorbida suggests joining a class or making a circle. Circles can take different forms such as one to share work and get some feedback on your work from fellow writers. (Thank you Easy Writers with whom I worked for years.) You can form a circle where you get together to write and share your work, focusing on what most resonates with each listener. If you need some confidence building and aren’t out for impressing publishers, this is the way to go. (This is the approach taken in the Writing Life women’s writing circles I lead.)
In her chapter entitled, “Keep A Diary,” Valmorbida says “Don’t attempt to write out your entire day, every day.” I do, especially lately, as it’s a grounding exercise for me. I like her suggestion though of choosing a theme – “just one strand of experience – say, the music you’ve been listening to, where and how you heard it, what effects it has on you. Or you could focus on the places you’ve been to, physically and imaginatively, and see what thoughts take shape in your writing.”
That approach sounds like you could end up with some prose poems or short pieces of life writing that describe a year in your life. Recently I picked up a copy of The Book of Delights by Ross Gay in which in wrote about delights or “small joys we often overlook” each day for a year beginning with his 42nd birthday.
Valmormida says: “If you do only one thing in the diary department, I urge you to try your hand at this: gratitude. Make a regular record of the day’s blessings: a pleasure experience, a kind gesture, an accomplishment, a loved one, a smile, a gift, a moment of beauty.”
It’s a grand way to sleep at night “with a smile in your mind, and your dormant body will be suffused with benevolence.”
Studies show that, over time, this positive writing ritual can lower stress and anxiety levels, while boosting self-confidence, clarity of thought and resilience. In other words, you could be writing yourself happy.”
While publication can be a thrill, Valmorda says, “If you want to be published, you’ll be happier if your desire to write is greater than your desire to be published.”
I agree with that. “The point is to write,” Valmorida says. “The joy is in the doing. Discovering yourself, word by word. Unearthing ideas, word by word. Try creating without regard to result. Enjoy the process, how the practice of writing subtly makes its way into how you’re living. Your writing, like your life, is a work in progress.”
And you can always re-envision a situation as you write. In her chapter entitled “Invent an Alternative Present,” Valmorbida says: “You can rewrite the present with the hope of making things better. And – who knows ? – such action may even succeed in making things better.“
I believe that what we write can draw situations to us. Writing can be powerful. People have said they wrote in their journals about situations they’d like to improve and without realizing until some time later, they drew to themselves the home, the relationship, the job they were desiring. There’s also prescience in writing so that we write about a situation long before it comes to pass. I even did that in a collage (done in about 2015) with an image of a house that looks very much like the one we live in now.
Valmorbida says in her chapter, “Write the Future,” that John Updike “commented on the frequently prophetic quality of his fiction, to the point where people would appear in his life who’d started out as fictional characters. Reality eventually acts out our imaginings: when we write, we do so out of latency, not just memory.”
A good suggestion in the book is to write out the negative and positive. The “negative” could be the emotions related to traumatic events. Valmorbida notes the work of James Pennebaker who investigated the effects of “expressive writing” and found that it led to an improvement in various physical symptoms and immune function. So writing about your “deepest thoughts and feelings can lead to better health – and notably fewer visits to the doctor.”
As Valmorbida says, writing about negative experiences or “vexing” people “doesn’t take the vexations away, but it does take away some of the sting.”
Virginia Woolf, in her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” referring to a “shock,” wrote: “It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together.”
Woolf has connected the pleasures of writing therapeutically and writing artistically. Valborbida says of her own fiction writing that while writing her last novel, “I felt a general sense of satisfaction, commitment and purpose, a quiet inner anchoring – even during difficult times.”
I appreciate the term “inner anchoring” which I find applies to writing in a journal every day and in writing a poem about what one observes in the moment.
Elise Valmorbida says “Be interested in everything, Read everything. Learn something from everything.”
Number 100 in her book is “Write Now.” “ Now is the beginning of the future. The quality of your now affects the quality of all your future nows. Now is the most important time of all.”
by Mary Ann Moore | Mar 25, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
I asked the women in the Writing Life circle, what’s in the middle? It was the first writing circle of a six-week series with the theme of “Piecing Our Stories from Life.” I had quilts in mind when I came up with the theme of “piecing” and quilts always start in the middle.
The women in the Writing Life circle have written together, in the past, for weeks and some for years. I wondered what they thought was in the middle of the writing they had done in the past. What did they think was a recurring theme.
As I write along with the other writers, I thought of the “middle” of my own writing. It’s interesting to approach the question by answering it in the third person as then you can have some distance and some insight about this particular writer whose work you have read (who just happens to be you).
I wrote: Mary Ann Moore writes about peonies in her grandparents’ garden, her first grade school teacher, a fresh radish from the vegetable patch. It’s life’s ordinary pleasures that appear to bring her joy. Even while travelling in Greece or Turkey, Mary Ann notes the oregano on feta, a circle of women telling stories. There is a spiritual aspect – the muezzin’s call to prayer, the sanctity of the Hagia Sophia, the sarcophagus of the poet Rumi with its gold Arabic calligraphy. [Photo of crewel work by my mother, Billie, with cover of poem called “Women’s Hands.”]
Planting seeds in the field of a Turkish eco-farm takes her back to sitting by the cucumber patch with her grandfather, his cutting of a fresh cucumber slice with his pocket knife.
Mary Ann links the Ottawa Valley to Turkey and includes the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo at times perhaps for her determination to create despite the physical odds against her. Or it may have been her painting that kept Kahlo alive and Mary Ann reflects on the creativity of women with her grandmother’s quilt, her crocheted doilies and the work of other women whether in a traditional Greek cloth bag woven in patterns of red or a killim created by village women. [Photo of cloth bags made with images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Frida Kahlo.]
The fact that certain languages don’t have a word for “art” fascinates Mary Ann and is at the middle of her explorations.
The people of ancient Crete made pithos jars to hold olive oil, decorated them with carved flowers and leaves.
In a jam jar on the oil cloth covered kitchen table of her childhood was a bouquet of buttercups and daisies.
The beauty of everyday objects, her relationship with the plant world and to her ancestors, connects this writer to a magnificent spiritual system. [Photo of detail of Turkish, hand painted plate.]
Does the “spiritual system” have a name?
God?
Goddess?
Tea cup?
Peony?
Prayer?
by Mary Ann Moore | Mar 15, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
It’s spring here on Vancouver Island with crocus, daffodils, primulas, hellebores and other colourful flowers in bloom. Winter was a challenge as we had more snow than usual (and we’re not prepared for that out here) and Sarah and I learned in December that the house in which we’d rented the upper level for seventeen years was being sold.
Packing is tiresome on its own and to that, I decided to go through everything, letting go of books, many journals, notes, and other papers filling files. There are still photo albums to pare down which I’ve inherited from my great aunt, aunt and uncle, and father. I’m now at the stage of putting things away in a beautiful home, also a rental and all to ourselves, about fifteen minutes south of Nanaimo. [The photo shows the end of the house where Sarah has her studio and she and our younger cat, Izzy, can go out on the deck.]
Sarah and I are very grateful to have found such an amazing place. We thought we had to seriously “downsize” and this place is bigger. We’re appreciating the quiet of being out in the country and the space around us. We’re on five acres along with the owners’ house and we’re feeling expansive in various ways. We’re also feeling the challenges of an adjustment and look forward to the days when our surroundings feel comfortable and familiar. It’s getting like that more and more every day. (We’ve been here two weeks now.)
As I unpacked the linen closet items, I came across a quilt my grandmother made with other quilters in the 1950s. They sat around a quilting frame, sharing stories as they pieced and stitched.
The quilts became stories too as fabric, ribbon, and other fragments turned into works of art and of practicality. The pieces creating the pattern of hearts in my grandmother’s quilt are from her cotton housedresses, already faded. The backing is made of bleached flour sacks. I have always loved quilts and this particular one is full of the memories of my early life with my grandparents in Eganville, in the Ottawa Valley, Ontario. I expect I used it on my bed when I was a kid and here we are sixty-five or so years later.
The women quilters were “piecing” which is similar to what we do when we write, stitching scenes from memory that may become part of a larger work. I think it is a good metaphor for the next six-week Writing Life circle which will begin on Wednesday, March 23. We’ll gather in person at my home in Nanaimo as if around the quilting frame, in a circle to write and share with the theme of “Piecing Our Stories From Life.” You’ll find further info here.
Writing was the healing place where I could collect the bits and pieces, where I could put them together again. It was the sanctuary, the safe place.
from Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work by bell hooks (1952 – 2021)
As several of us have discovered, we can connect to one another by sharing our stories by email. For those of you not able to attend a Nanaimo writing circle, I’m offering a circle “from away” via email called “Our Stories and How They Connect Us.” It begins Thursday, March 24.
For some, it’s actually more comfortable to express themselves through the written word only. You may have discovered that through writing letters to someone and finding out more about yourself and your pen pal as you do so. Several women were part of the circle “from away” in the past and I hope we can rekindle those connections. You’ll find more information here.
On occasion, I’ll offer individual writing circles via Zoom. Back in the spring of 2020, I didn’t think offering women’s writing circles via Zoom would work or offer the same depth of writing and sharing experience. As it turns out, Zoom has been a very helpful partner in offering circles so that we can stay connected by following the same guidelines we follow in the in-person circles.
I wish you a Happy Spring, clearing away what no longer serves you which may include, as the days go by, an easing of restrictions imposed during the pandemic. Think of the babies and toddlers who won’t have seen many faces and will now be able to see us un-masked. So many stories to share of our experiences of the last two years, the hardships, disappointments and the many gifts.
by Mary Ann Moore | Feb 27, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
Sarah and I have never lived anywhere for seventeen years, in the same house that is, together or apart, before the house in which we’ve lived in Nanaimo.
Now we’re on the move to another home in Nanaimo, about fifteen minutes south of downtown, and I’m thinking of all I’m appreciating about our current home – for just one more day.
We arrived in Nanaimo, B.C. from Guelph, Ontario with our four cats in May of 2005. We had a few suitcases with us but that was it until our furniture and other belongings arrived about a week later. Life was very simple with so few belongings. Our landlord Peter loaned us laundry baskets full of linens, a mattress, a lamp, dishes and cutlery. I can’t imagine now being without my computer for a week! Sarah painted the bedrooms and we’d take little jaunts out to get to know our new city. Neck Point, just seven minutes from our home, was a favourite spot where we looked towards the Sunshine Coast of the mainland.
Our rental was to be temporary as we looked for a house to buy. I don’t remember ever looking for a house once we landed here. Or perhaps, we did occasionally. We got very comfortable and were treated very well in our rental home.
Our rent was affordable. Buying a house with its upkeep would mean “jobs” and why spend time elsewhere to buy a house that you can’t spend much time in? We stayed with our art making and graphic design, in Sarah’s case, and freelance writing, poetry and writing circles, in mine. Besides, Peter has been a landlord extraordinaire. He continued to work in his wonderful garden that is terraced with three ponds and a waterfall. The vista from our living room is of the Grandmother of All Surrounding Mountains, Te’tuxwtun to the Snuneymuxw people, and the mountains south of Nanaimo. We could watch the phases of the moon and the many aspects of the sky throughout the day and evening. In our front courtyard, we could sit under the mulberry tree and hazelnut, chatting with friends perhaps.
Peter liked to dry herbs from his garden, make tomato juice, salsa, and strawberry jam and share his prime rib roast with us. We were never without surprise treats of dinner or lunch. Oh, and there was Christmas with spiced nuts and bolts, shortbread cookies, butter tarts and a turkey dinner if he happened not to be in Mexico. (We had our last Christmas dinner in December 2021.)
If ever we ran out of anything, the stores were close but Peter’s pantry was closer!
The four cats we brought with us have all died: Miss Pooh, Kadi, Simon and Qwinn. We’re leaving their ashes here, in the Zen garden at the top of the driveway, and their spirits are always with us so they’ll be coming along to our new home in the country. And we’ll be taking Squeaker and Izzy with us, both very much alive. And so far, weathering the transition very well.
I wrote Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice here and Writing to Map Your Spiritual Journey was made into a digital format. I published poetry in various publications including chapbook anthologies edited by Patrick Lane, my own chapbooks, and a full length book of poems (Fishing for Mermaids, Leaf Press, 2014).
Other writing was in the form of advertorials for the Nanaimo Daily News, articles for More Living magazine and Synergy, book reviews for the Vancouver Sun and other publications.
I mention all these things as I’ve been going through files of clippings going back to the eighties. I do have some folios of articles I’ve written but those ancient files have been recycled. So many journals have been shredded as I ready myself to carry the memories although not in physical form. It’s time for a fresh new chapter for both Sarah and me.
It’s been wonderful to be part of a writing community on Vancouver Island. I started meeting writers right away when I attended the Victoria School of Writing and began going to poetry retreats with the late Patrick Lane. Connections made there with other poets have continued.
I appreciated WordStorm monthly poetry events in Nanaimo co-founded by David Fraser and Cindy Shantz. I joined a group with them and other writers, calling ourselves the Easy Writers. We had such fun going to Poetry Gabriola as a group meeting the likes of Robert Priest, Richard Van Camp, Ivan Coyote and Sheri-D Wilson.
At home, I started offering women’s writing circles called Writing Life (a continuation of the Flying Mermaids circles I had offered in Ontario) and I held salons for friends who had new books: Laura Apol from Michigan, Arleen Pare from Victoria, Alison Watt from Protection Island, Diana Hayes from Salt Spring Island, and Leanne McIntosh from Nanaimo. I think I had a salon way back when for Tina Biello and we did other readings together as our poetry books had come out at the same time.
I made flower essences in the garden here starting with Rhododendron, the definition of which is Self-Trust. Spirit of the Island is the name of the flower essence series, a name Sarah and I came up with together. Another of the Spirit of the Island flower essences is Camellia: Be Here Now. It is a photo of the camellia that attracted our new landlord to read Sarah’s post re looking for a place to live.
Since the house was sold in December (we’ve been renting the main level suite), we’ve been letting things go. We’ve made several trips to the Haven Society thrift store and to Well Read Books, Literacy Central’s bookstore. And I’ve given many books away to women in the circle circle. Still, there are many books to pack. We’re at a stage now that we want to take with us what will support our new phase. We’re not sure what that will look like but we’re grateful we have found a beautiful rental home in the country. Our new home will have lots of room including studio and office space, a garage and five acres on which to roam. The owners also have a house on the property. Annemarie is an avid gardener which is what attracted her to the camellia.
Thinking ahead to our new home has kept us going during these final days of packing as well as appreciating all we’ve enjoyed here.
A faded garden flag
empty flower pots
a tiny temple under the ferns
by Mary Ann Moore | Jan 14, 2022 | A Poet's Nanaimo
So many people passed on in 2021 including many poets and writers we’ve come to love through their work. I so appreciated Lee Maracle’s work in the world and had the honour and delight of working with her during the summer of 1993. Since hearing of Lee’s death on November 11, 2021, I’ve been thinking of the two weeks spent at West Word IX, a women’s writing retreat held at a college campus in North Vancouver, B.C.
All these years later, obviously, the two weeks at women’s writing retreat had a huge impact on me and I expect, others who attended Lee’s fiction workshop. I think the poets and the creative non-fiction groups may have been envious of all the fun we were having.
Lee had us walking on the desks in our portable classroom so as to have a fresh perspective, and some fun, and we took walks through the woods near the college, together. We all continued to learn from her as we hung out at meals or in the evenings. I first learned “muscle testing” from Lee and I still remember her advice about keeping hydrated so as not to pick up all the energies in a room full of people.
When people spoke of women getting the vote (in 1922 with some provinces earlier than that and Quebec not until 1940), Lee pointed out that was the vote for white women. It was not until 1960 that “suffrage” in federal elections was extended to First Nations women and men “without requiring them to give up their treaty status.” (The quote is from Wikipedia.)
Lee did not think much of writer Margaret Laurence nor artist Emily Carr. I have had different views of Laurence and Carr since then.
Margaret Laurence wrote of a First Nations male character in The Diviners who Lee felt was depicted in a degrading way. In her 2020 Writers Trust lecture, named for Margaret Laurence, Lee noted The Diviners and “the violence of the dirty halfbreed” as he was described and depicted, and the daughter in the book being prevented from seeing her father (who was the First Nations man.)
In the Writers Trust lecture (which you can find on line), Lee said she was grateful to be honoured. She said she cherished Dionne Brand who says “no language is neutral.” Lee, who was a member of the Sto-lo Nation on British Columbia’s coast, said every word originates in a body and is a salutation to the skies.
While people have “reclaimed” language such as “dyke” and “queer” for instance, Lee said reclaiming the terms “squaw” and “halfbreed,” would fail to become positive. She could feel such an act “dismantle” her being.
Lee wasn’t in favour of “deleting history” but she was against people reading about themselves as the subjects of degradation. She suggested we explore racism in literature. She included Mark Twain in that category.
As for Emily Carr, I remember Lee talking to Susan Crean, who was leading the Creative Non-Fiction group at the writing retreat in 1993. Susan was writing a book about Emily Carr, the artist Lee called a racist. I had a look again at Susan’s book, The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr (HarperCollins, 2001) to remind me of that time as Susan wrote about her conversation with Lee.
At a public reading by the writing retreat instructors that was taped and broadcast on Co-op radio, Susan read from some of her notes “for an article on Emily Carr.” Susan was followed by Lee Maracle, reading from her book Ravensong. “Afterward she [Lee] delivered a stinging rebuke of my appropriation of her people’s stories, commingled with an elegiac prayer for her ancestors.”
Lee was always direct but it didn’t mean she dismissed people altogether. When Susan sought her out after breakfast the day following the reading, Lee “wasn’t angry or unfriendly,” Susan says in her book. “I even asked her why, given history, Native peoples tolerate the company of Whites.”
“She [Lee] shrugged and told me that my faux pas didn’t change the fact we were friends. As for Emily Carr, she guessed it was my choice if I wanted to rehabilitate a racist.”
Susan refers in The Laughing One to a “controversy” that had erupted in the spring of 1993 with the publication of an analysis by Haida/Tsimsian art historian Marcia Crosby regarding Emily Carr’s portrayal of Native peoples and “other White settler society.”
Crosby’s work said that “Carr’s knowledge of Native culture was fragmentary and minimal,” even though as Susan writes, “a special emotional attachment might be conceded.”
Many people have said of the art by white artists portraying First Nations villages, artifacts, and sacred ceremonies that they are preserving a culture that needs to be “saved.” As Crosby wrote: “[Those] doing the saving choose what fragments of a culture they will salvage. Having done this, they become both the owners and interpreters of the artefacts or goods that have survived.”
[Photo of Lee Maracle by Mary Ann Moore, 1993]
One day in our fiction group at the retreat in 1993, a woman of colour suggested the other Black, Indigenous and women of colour meet together. One of the white women thought we should all stick together not realizing the strength and solidarity the BIPOC women would gain by meeting on their own. I had the good fortune of having some anti-racism training through the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre where I had been a volunteer so suggested the white women meet in a group as well to discuss our part in adding to the unease and lack of safety for the BIPOC women.
We white women met on our own and heard the story of the woman who had been opposed to the BIPOC gathering. It was from that experience I learned that people don’t listen until they have had their own stories heard. I’ll call the woman Irene, the one we listened to about her family’s involvement with Nazis. It was shocking and although we had listened to Irene’s story, she chose not to stay for the second week of the retreat.
I learned lots at that retreat in 1993 including how writing is about all of life. I described some of my learning in my book Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice.
I recalled getting the letter of acceptance from West Word IX, the women’s writing retreat organized by volunteers, and taking it to the law firm where I worked as I was so excited about the good news. I would be spending two weeks of my vacation writing with other women. I was up for the challenge.
At the retreat, we had morning workshops with afternoons free to write, take a walk, have a massage. There were often spontaneous gatherings to share our work and there was also lots of play. We’d leave notes on one another’s room doors describing imaginary, playful gatherings.
I made changes when I got home to Toronto so that I could spend more time writing. I told my employer that I could do my job of scheduling in three-and-a-half days a week and they went for it. I think I had already moved to a cheaper apartment closer to work so I didn’t have transportation costs.
As I recall the community we created at West Word IX, I remember:
We met daily in a circle.
We each had a voice.
We told our stories.
We received wise guidance from an elder/leader.
We spoke through tears.
We “played” which gave us a different view of the situation and the world.
We “slowed the picture down” which was one of Lee’s pieces of advice about our writing.
We took a walk together seeing life’s lessons in Nature.
We acknowledged spirits, ghosts, and the energy of the land.
We ate meals together and shared our experiences of the day.
We had a room of our own to connect to ourselves and to write.
We had impromptu readings of our work.
We got silly.
We dealt with issues such as racism when they arose.
We honoured ourselves in readings of our work to which we invited others.
I was glad to be able to see Lee again a few times after we went home to Toronto, from the retreat. She joined me and other new friends from the writing retreat at a lesbian bar one evening. She did the same in Vancouver when we went to Lulu’s. It’s funny that I remember one of the songs we danced to in a circle: “Rhythm is a Dancer.”
We were excited, in emails, about my book launch in April, 2014 when Lee was actually going to be on Vancouver Island. We weren’t able to make the connection in person but was grateful for our mutual enthusiasm for our connection, however we could make it.
Thank you Lee for your witnessing, your speaking up, your passion, your writing, your teaching, your support, your speaking up. And for telling me I was the bravest white woman you had ever met and you estimated you had met about 10,000 white people at that time. Your encouragement was, I expect, the impetus for me to return to Vancouver in 1994, rent a car, and drive to Lytton where my great uncle had been principal of St. George’s Residential School in the late 1920s and early 1930s. My research, writing and acknowledgement continues.
. . .
We have lived for 11,000 years on this coastline
This is not the first massive death we have endured
We girded up our loins,
Recovered and re-built
We are builders,
We are singers,
We are dancers,
We are speakers
And we are still singing
We are dancing again
. . .
From “Blind Justice” by Lee Maracle (2013)
