Phoebe Wang, Relative to Wind: On Sailing, Craft, and Community

A rope on a boat is never a rope—it’s a line, sheet, or halyard. The boat doesn’t turn left or right but to port or starboard. If you’re walking to the front of any watercraft, you’re going forward to the bow. When you’re moving toward its rear, you’re moving aft to the stern.
            You could draw a boat and label it, but why do that when you can pick up boat words the way a child might? By pointing up at the spreaders, the spars that act like crosstrees extending from the mast. By curling your fingers around the shrouds, the boat’s wire rigging. By remembering that the lifelines are the vinyl-coated wires around the perimeter of the boat when you grab onto them to steady yourself. By pestering the skipper with questions—What’s this? What’s this? Your eagerness earns you a spell on the tiller, and you feel the weight of the water streaming against the rudder. Trip over one of the hard, small parts of the boat and land on your knees, swearing and embarrassed at everyone’s quick concern. You’ll remember the cleat, block, or winch like the name of someone you instantly dislike. Not knowing these names is as clear a sign of a landlubber as wearing sneakers that leave skid marks on the deck. Not knowing means you’ll be corrected until you do.

Lately I’ve been reading Toronto poet Phoebe Wang’s Relative to Wind: On Sailing,Craft, and Community (Picton ON: Assembly Press, 2024), a memoir around the author’s experience as part of a sailing crew on Lake Ontario, an experience that seems to provide the author with the foundation to more easily navigate both anxiety and other elements of her life, from attending expectations as a published author, elements of family and employment or even writing itself. “After finishing my MA in creative writing, I couldn’t find full-time work, so instead I tutored in Richmond Hill and Vaughan. I sat on the edge of my train seat, worrying that I wouldn’t make my connection en route, calculating whether I would make rent that month, how much longer it would take to find a publisher, whether it was still worth it to scrawl poems while the Viva Blue bus bounced up Yonge Street. I relieved myself of the pressure to publish as quickly as possible, to instead focus on the vision of my manuscript that felt most true to itself. I was surprised to be making gains, turning out drafts of poems that sounded as close as possible to what I had intended. By easing up on myself and following my intuition, I set a course toward a more natural and sustainable routine.”

This is Wang’s third published book, after the poetry collections Admission Requirements (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2017) and Waking Occupations (McClelland and Stewart, 2022) [see my review of such here]. The prose moves easily, at a lively pace, offering a lovely music just underneath the surface, holding the attention with a propulsion and a thrum. I like very much how this book begins with language, using the fact of learning a new vocabulary for this new process as an opening into and through the narrative. “Language can function as both a barrier and an entry point into an identity,” she writes, early in the collection, “and in the case of the language of sailing, it kept me out before it let me in. Its arcane impenetrability felt purposeful, like a code. This inaccessibility maybe a result of its etymology and how its meanings have diverged from English words of common usage.” To engage with the language, and the etymologies of such, of course, is to engage with those histories, and the implications within, as she acknowledges a colonial past, one that, as she is deeply aware, holds a ripple effect into the present. “All of this colonial violence—conscsription practices, hierarchies of rank, naval wars, and transport of raw resources—has steeped into the language like tea leaves in scalding water. These were the same seamen and ships that held enslaved peoples in cargo holds, encountered Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, mapped coastlines, and claimed harbours for shipping ports. The English language also travelled by sea, as much as import as systems of government, laws, and policies. British ships brough opium to the ports of Hong Kong, the islands where my family lived with the sound of the waves at their doorsteps. Remnants of this history are still present in nautical terms and saying, many of which have entered everyday language.”

She writes of sailing, but also elements of attempting to write, find work and sustain balance, and engaging a space not traditionally populated by women of colour. Approaching both writing and sailing, as well as multiple elements across her life, Relative to Wind articulates Wang’s journey to finding her footing, even in rough waters. Not to wrestle the storm, perhaps, or her own anxieties, but to learn how to navigate them. As she writes: “The air around us is constantly heating and cooling, and periods of apparent calm are only temporary. Our environment may appear still and windless from our vantage point close to the Earth’s surface, but the prevailing condition on this planet is motion.”