Wedding: a small report (with pictures)

I’m sure everyone knows by now that Christine McNair and I were married at Gordon Church, St. Elmo [see my write-up on the historic church and why we used it, here] in Glengarry County on September 29, 2012. It was an incredible day, surrounded by plenty of friends and family (and yet, many we’d hoped might be able to attend were unable to make it). Below is a photo taken at my insistence of the entire crowd of attendees behind us in a group shot, in front of the church post-ceremony. A couple of years ago, I saw an amazing post-wedding ceremony photograph of my great-uncle Donald McLennan (August 1, 1898 – August 17, 1955) and aunt Jesse (September 12, 1904 – August 13, 2011) from their Ottawa nuptials, July 22, 1930 [I posted the photo on Jesse’s obituary, here], and wanted our own version.

[photos by Julie Young for Photo Van Beek] The ceremony was conducted by my uncle, Don Moore, a retired Presbyterian minister, and husband to my mother’s remaining sister, Pam. He’s been participating in various family funerals over the years, and he even officiated my sister’s wedding a few years back (recently licensed to do same, Pam officiated my young cousin Peter’s nuptials last fall). Ottawa beer rep and member of the Glengarry Pipe Band Ross May did the piping, and Stephen Brockwell did a remarkable job as best man, as did Christine’s aunt Trish, in her role as Maid of Honour. Parents were essential, as was my sister, and a number of others who we couldn’t have done any of this without. We had tons of food at our Ottawa reception, including macarons produced by a pastry chef who works out of Lebreton Flats, German pastries made by some of Christine’s family, and then of course, there’s the photograph of our magnificent wedding cake, posted a couple of days ago. And yes, I did actually wear the proper tartan for the McLennans, and the best man, Stephen Brockwell, wore his mother's tartan, MacRae.

It’s pretty safe to say we’ve been overwhelmed with the good wishes, support, cards, emails and gifts throughout, as well as by the ten-day honeymoon that moved its way through London, Paris and Brussels (as well as Flitwick and the village of Coton). Now that we’ve been back for a couple of weeks, we are finally, slowly, settling in to whatever comes next. Just what might come next?

Ongoing notes: late October, 2012

We’re back from the honeymoon, but still in the midst of post-wedding/honeymoon glow. Or is that merely hangover? In any case, we both attempt to re-enter the world, whatever that might bring. There might be photos soon, but god knows when. We have over a thousand to sift through.

In case you didn’t see it, here’s a photo of our wedding cake: Christine’s Conflict on the one side, and my Glengarry on the other, brilliantly made by The Cake Whisperer. Pretty damned impressive. And yes, it was an actual, real cake (we finished the last of it the other night).

Disappointed to see that Snare Books is no longer living the life of an independent press (see Fiorentino's official statement here), becoming instead an imprint of Invisible Publishing. Disappointed, but better they remain in some form that produces books than disappears altogether. When they first started publishing, they were full of vim and noise, and produced some very worthy books. Long live Snare! And then, of course, that more recent news about Douglas & McIntyre...

Also: Cameron Anstee did the most magnificent post the other day on Raymond Souster. Everyone should read it.

Note the number of events on the immediate right, at the top: a couple of events through The Factory Reading Series (November 15 and November 16, as well as a December 15 event TBA and the annual Peter F Yacht Club Christmas party/reading/regatta on December 29) and the ottawa small press book fair, among other things. Keep an eye out, as there are most likely more events to come over the next couple of months. And did you see that two above/ground press titles made the bpNichol Chapbook Award shortlist...?

Montreal QC: In my hands recently comes another publication by Calgary’s NO Press, The Winnipeg Cold Storage Company by Montreal-based Jon Paul Fiorentino, released in an edition of 75 copies in August, 2012. In Fiorentino’s small offering, he continues his fascination with mythmaking and geography, working over, across and through his hometown of Winnipeg, as he does more specifically in the title poem:

The title of “Winnipeg Cold Storage Company” poses the question of collective memory and what it means to say that ‘things might be done with storage’? The problem of collective memory is thus immediately bound up with a question of performance. What does it mean for storage not only to store, but also in some sense to perform and, in particular, to perform what it stores?

In the colophon of the small book, he writes that “The text from ‘Winnipeg Cold Storage Company’ is appropriated and manipulated with the most love from Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performance by Judith Butler.” There are some intriguing visual pieces in the collection as well, and Fiorentino delights in playing with the modes and structures of others, including education and academia, but it’s the title poem that really stands out, and I’m curious to know how much he borrowed from the Judith Butler text. It makes me curious to see what and where these poems might appear next, and what kind of book-length work this work teases us for. Just where is Fiorentino going?

The question of whether citizenship requires the repression of Winnipeg is not new, but the recent efforts to regulate the self-storage of citizenship within Winnipeg repose this question in a different light. After all, Winnipeggers enjoy some of the rights and obligations of citizenship, but not all of them.

London ON: I’ve long been an admirer of the work of Colbourne, Ontario poet, visual artist and curator Gil McElroy, so am extremely pleased to see the chapbook Ordinary Time: The Merton Lake Propers (London ON: Baseline Press, 2012). As McElroy writes on the acknowledgments: “The Merton Lake poem sequence of Ordinary Time was inspired by the invitation of poet Dan Waber to participate in a project in which a number of writers were asked to create a daily journal entry for the month of November, 2012 which he then published on-line.” The poem itself, a series of excerpts from a much longer sequence, opens with two important pieces of information:

ORDINARY TIME—the parts of the liturgical year

that do not fall in one of the seasons of Advent,

Christmas, Lent, or Easter

PROPER—designating a service, psalm, lesson, etc.,

specially appointed for a particular day or season

For those unaware of McElroy’s writing, this small work ties immediately into his poetry collection, Ordinary Time (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), his fourth trade poetry collection, all of which have appeared with Vancouver’s Talonbooks. Time is an essential part of McElroy’s writing, ranging from the cosmic (including an astrological sense of asteroids, constellations and shooting starts) to more human considerations, such as his ongoing “Some Julian Days” sequence that use dates from the Julian Calendar. Time is what he centres the entirety of his work around, highlighting the mundane day to day as magical by turning it slightly, altering its perception.

Proper 30

S

Bar all terrible saints. Steep them in the storm. There will be a wind. There will be something marvellous half-buried in the south – & unexpected. There will be combat, after all. Ridge directions stare down at an even place & the dry moments forming there. Though out three simple glances. Was a bit dizzy at the bad taste left in my mouth. Thought them out again. Chewed them splendid. Then cut them back.

Rainy boots. Nothing thought of while some news resolved. Probably hopeless. Lively ideas feel me, of course. “Hope so,” I said at the end, so pious & anathema, me. It all strikes me dutiful & such. The morning is competent with sermons dug up for everything. All that, and no doubt then. One gets between symbols, & then kapow!

By night, of course. But enough light dawned. Brick winds large around everything. The road out of places. A couple of thousand snowy silences along the way talking.

The wilderness terribly becomes, now. Sick of it. Mornings I wake up of it. Heavy rain in back of it. It will be too late of it. The lake of of it. I did not return to the right, getting back of it. Each remembered dream let go of it. Really lamentable, but purely mechanical. The 20^th century gone astray of it. Very, perhaps. I cannot be sure.

Edmonton AB: For some time now, Edmonton poet Douglas Barbour has been working a sequence of jazz-related poems under the title “Recording Dates” (including the poem “Jane Bunnett plays the Yardbird Suite,” produced as an above/ground press broadside back in September, 2002). Newly out from Jenna Butler’s Rubicon Press is Barbour’s chapbook Recording Dates (2012), a selection of some of these pieces.

October 9 & 10 1974:

Death comes in many guises, a black bird

and a white whale equally partake of the great,

the intense and final prayer,

flower of the atom, atomy of the flower.

Prayer is both response to and refusal of the

great journey now begun, whale and

bird both taking the shortest route possible to death.

Of all the books that Rubicon has produced over the past decade or so, this is easily the most attractive she’s produced, in production and design, and is worth picking up for that alone. As far as Barbour’s work, his poems have always had a quick sense of movement, riffing and bouncing from point to point, idea to idea, so the idea of “jazz poems” makes entirely too much sense. This is a fantastic little chapbook; I love the movement, the flow of the pieces, something Barbour has been exploring for quite some time, but somehow, never quite gets the credit or comprehension he deserves for it.

May 15 1953:

Perdido: memory gone. That’s how it works. You

salt the mind, still hoping for the real. They got

peanuts for the gig but you got the memory.

All the way back to 1953 and what

the hell happened that night. Those nights. There are some

things you only know by hearsay, yet it’s that story

you heard about ten years later & read about. Those few hours

are part of your memory now – as if you’d been there, listening.

Wee? No it was huge   cool or

hot it doesn’t matter, they tore the

house down for a small crowd soon to grow with telling.

A wonderful feeling, watching that white plastic wave & weave all

night long & the notes pour forth. Heaven-pointed trumpet, everyone

in synch: great music for the ages & you can still hear A Night in

Tunesia every time you place the disc just so.

St. Elmo (Gordon) Church, Glengarry

There is a framed poster in my father’s house announcing the opening of the Presbyterian Church at St. Elmo on July 20^th, 1864. The red brick and steeple stand on the hill just north of what is now the village of Maxville and as their congregation diminished as the population shifted, the church merged with St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Maxville in 1947. The church currently hosts two services a year—Communion and the Anniversary Service—down from the four a year I grew up with. This is my home church and one that still holds Sunday school rolls in the back with my father’s name next to a series of attendance stars; the same building of hardwood, musty floors my sister spends hours cleaning for services. Our September 29^th wedding is the third held at the church since 1972 and the first since 1990. The website at Archeion.ca holds a brief history of the church:

The congregation of Gordon Presbyterian Church in St. Elmo, Ontario traces its origins to c.1826 when the Presbyterian settlers in the area then known as the Indian Lands community began construction of a frame church in the 17th Concession. The first minister to conduct services in the church was the Rev. Archibald Connel, the minister in Martintown. In 1838, the Rev. Daniel Clark of Inverness, Scotland, arrived and served as missionary to the area for a year, before accepting a call as minister. In 1844, Rev. Clark and many of the families in the Indian Lands community broke away from the Presbyterian Church of Canada in Connection with the Church of Scotland and joined the Free Presbyterian Church. Disputes over ownership of the church and manse between the two groups continued until 1860 when it was given to the group in connection with the Church of Scotland. As a result the “Free Church” Presbyterians along with the minister, Rev. Daniel Gordon (who replaced Rev. Clark in 1853), began construction of a new church on the19th Concession. This was opened in 1864. The name of this community at the 19th Concession became known as St. Elmo in the early 1880s, and the church became known as the “Gordon Church”. At the time of Church Union in 1925, the congregation of the Gordon Church, St. Elmo, voted to remain with The Presbyterian Church in Canada.

The St. Elmo Church, as well as the 395-acre farm I grew up on, exist on what is known as the “Indian Lands,” a swath that boundaries north from the Ottawa River all the way south to the St. Lawrence, stretching two miles across the border of Glengarry and Stormont Counties. These were large open spaces that would later become parts of the Province of Ontario, but were previously Mohawk lands before they were pushed south by European settlement to end up in the St. Lawrence River at St. Regis. Originally leased by the British for a 99-year term, it was formally “acquired” by the British in 1840 and parceled out as land grants. Some land went to settlers who had been living and working their plots for years and others were settled for the first time. Arriving from Scotland somewhere between 1821 and 1840 with his parents and five siblings, John McLennan received lot 3, concession 7 Roxborough as a land grant in 1845, the same land where my father has lived since he was six months old. For reasons I have yet to determine, John and his family moved next door by 1860, into a farm that was passed down the line to my great-grandfather, and was later run by my grandfather and one of his elder brothers. Upon his marriage, my grandfather John Duncan McLennan lived briefly in the log house across the road from the homestead, before returning to lot 3, concession 7 with infant Douglas in tow. My father has lived there since, in the farmhouse where my sister Kathy and I were raised.

Originally marked out in 1770, Glengarry Country originally stretched all the way north to the Ottawa River, unlike the current northern border just south of Highway 417, making it the oldest county in Ontario and (I’ve heard say) the last in the province to receive telephone service. One of the features of Glengarry is that immigration actually began before the Loyalist surge came north across the American border. When the county was originally founded on what is now considered to be settled by the largest concentration of Scottish immigration in the country, their boundaries also included also the eastern half of Stormont County and parts of Quebec. Marianne McLean, in her magnificent The People of Glengarry: Highlanders in Transition, 1745-1820 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), writes:

Between 1773 and 1853, close to 3,500 people emigrated to Glengarry County from a few districts in the Scottish Highlands. The emigrants came principally from the districts of Lochiel, Glengarry, Knoydart, and Glenelg, in the mountainous western rim of mainland Inverness-shire. Many of the clansmen of this region had been fervent supporters of the Jacobite cause in 1745; the Camerons of Lochiel and Macdonells of Glengarry followed Prince Charles Edward to bitter defeat at Culloden. All the inhabitants of western Inverness suffered the full effect of the military suppression of the revolt and then endured the government’s efforts to “civilize” the region in the generation that followed.

Maxville came later, invented through the rail line between Ottawa and Coteau Landing in 1881. The new village caused a small radius of hamlets to diminish, some into non-existence, including Tayside, Dominionville, Athol and St. Elmo, which is now only marked by the church building and small cemetery. My father’s maternal grandfather was once postmaster at Athol which was two miles north of St. Elmo and their farmhouse still stands, although Athol itself now no more than a roadsign at the intersection. After the church break-ins at St. Elmo during the early 1980s, the few valuables that were left in the building were removed and placed with the rest in my father’s house. The silver, a clock, this framed poster.

My father holds keys to a padlock most likely older than he is and points to a brick at the front of the church marked by the son of one of the parishioners marked and placed during the original construction. The musty smell that greets you at the door, the smell of a breath held in the building for years, perhaps decades. Every summer, opening the church to air out for upcoming services, the stale winter air pushed out into surrounding fields. Former paint-chipped ceiling suggesting colour long washed white; I remember the remnants of colour, swirling blues and light reds. I could talk of playing the church organ in my early teens, feet pumping pedals to keep the air moving, or singing once or twice in the choir, while wearing my grandfather’s robe. Since I left home at nineteen, a lawnmower engine was adapted to fit into the back of the organ and my father now rents a small generator for the sake of sound and overhead light.

Growing up, I read the novels of Ralph Connor, pen name for the Rev. Charles Gordon, son of Rev. Daniel Gordon, who spent his first decade living with his family in the St. Elmo manse. As Ralph Connor, he was one of Canada’s bestselling authors with sales of over a million copies. Some of his best-known books were composed on the area, written from his early life in the county, from The Man From Glengarry (1901), The Girl From Glengarry (1933) and, a particular favourite, Glengarry School Days (1902), which fictionalised the author’s early years, set around the church and the church hall, as well as the swimming hole at Hugh Fisher’s farm, another mile or two north. In many ways, discovering these books in the farmhouse as a pre-teen offered the possibility of writing. Even if I wasn’t aware of any contemporary writers when I lived on the farm, the fact that a writer had come from the area, writing books on the area and highly successful at that, presented the option in ways that nothing else was. Another novel of Connor’s, Torches Through the Bush (1934), fictionalized some of the story of the religious revivals and conflicts that led to the construction of the St. Elmo Church, based upon stories he had heard from his father. In Royce MacGillivray and Ewan Ross’ A History of Glengarry (Belleville ON: Mika Publishing Company, 1979), they write:

The Rev. Mr. Gordon’s congregation in the old church which we have just described was divided by the controversy, which was troubling Canadian Presbyterians at this time, between the Free Church of Scotland and the state Church of Scotland. Mr. Gordon had been a firm supporter of the Free Church since his student days. When he and his Free Church followers lost control of the old church building, they built a new brick church which has been known since the year of its opening as the Gordon Free Church, near the manse at St. Elmo. For the minister, it must have been convenient to have the manse and the church at last close to each other, but for the children it meant the end of such exhilarating rides to church as that described in the 9^th chapter of The Man from Glengarry. The work of building the church was in progress in 1863, and the opening ceremonies were held on 20 July 1864.

So much of the talk of the church is a talk of its origins, and yet so little has been said on what has happened since. A building still used and utilized, a building that still holds like an anchor on the small rise at St. Elmo, deep in the county. In the chapbook-length History of Gordon Church St. Elmo (1988), the late Rev. Wallace MacKinnon provides one of the more contemporary portraits of the church:

At present, Gordon Church Congregation consists of fifteen households and thirty-five communicant members. The financial situation is good and the congregation oversubscribes its allocation for the General Assembly, maintains in good condition the two Church buildings and the cemetery, and gives at least one bursary, and some years two, to theological students from Glengarry Presbytry, amounting to 150-300 dollars a year from the Hugh Cameron Memorial Bursary Fund. In addition, one of the members is giving an annual memorial gift of $500.00 to the Presbyterian College, Montreal, for academic awards or prizes. The church was completely redecorated in 1982. In 1987 five special services were held in Gordon Church: in June, a Communion Service; in August, a Memorial Service and an Anniversary Service observing the 150^th anniversary of the Congregational Church built in 1837 and now the Church Hall; and the 123^rd Anniversary Service for Gordon Church in September. The Maxville and District Masonic Lodge held a special service of worship in Gordon Church as part of the 100^th Anniversary of the Masonic Lodge on the last Sunday of September.

Christine McNair and I are to be married in Glengarry today,

so expect that, over the course of the next little bit, the posts here might be slightly more random than usual.

I might not be answering emails as quickly, either. See you after we're back!

I've been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize!

For the first time, I've been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize, for a selection of poems from the manuscript-in-progress, "household items." I'm in good company, too, alongside thirty-five others, including Stephanie Bolster, Sandy Pool (twice!), Bren Simmers, Deanna Young (twice!) and Alison Calder. Apparently the shortlist is announced on September 17, and the winner a week later. Wouldn't that be the finest wedding present ever?

from Notes on (a) Marriage: epithalamium: an essay-in-progress,

22/3/85

Nothing pleases a perfect wife, nothing. I told that to the blizzard.

The blizzard shrieked with laughter. Since then I’ve travelled often

to strange places, rain forests and tropical islands. I’m planning a

collection of turtle eggs.

            Robert Kroetsch, Excerpts from the Real World

A writer friend responds in an email, recommending I step back from wedding plans, and admit that the day is about her, and not us. He was much happier when he finally realized the same, and let his beloved proceed as she wished. Perhaps this is cynical, perhaps this is simply the difference between his wife and my soon-to-be, not in the least bit worried about either of us pulling too far in either direction, or tear at the other. How does one proceed? As Alberta writer Robert Kroetsch once famously asked, How do you write, how do you make love in a new country? If, as Saskatchewan poet John Newlove wrote, the past is a foreign country, then the future as well, a fresh space in which to spread out, take root.

Kroetsch says much about desire, but little about marriage. What is this, I wonder. In the title sequence of Advice to My Friends (Stoddart, 1985), he slips two in the middle, poems composed around and about a wedding reception. “At the wedding reception, such as it is, / How Morenz is asked to say a few words.” A wedding poem, wedding song, interrupted enough by the narrator and the subsequent action that a second poem is required. An epithalamium interrupted by a (Greek) chorus of mischievous ghazals. Just how much might Kroetsch have known about the Greeks? Quite a lot, I’d suspect. Never lonesome, in detail.

8. Wedding Dance, Country-Style

This will not be, Mr. Ondaatje explains,

your standard epithalamium. He is taking

pictures, both in colour and black and white.

The bride and the bridegroom are dancing.

Actually, everyone is dancing. George

(which George?) is dancing, with Gertrude Stein.

All of Victoria, later, expresses embarrassment,

but the dance, the dance is full of marvels.

Roy Kiyooka arrives by balloon. He drops in

for a polka. He is the only person who brings

an escape plan as a gift. It is a collage

of 1,243 pages, in code, with maps and diagrams,

all of which Mr. Ondaatje photographs

as part of the epithalamium, and the ecstatic

document, in arrest, has about it the air

of a painting of a forest exploding into light,

or of a hockey game, under the lights, exploding.

But the dance, the dance is the first decoding.

Consider his volume of poem/journal entries, Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), written ostensibly as letter-poems to his then-wife, Smaro Kamboureli, during the period she was in Greece composing her own journal, in the second person (Longspoon, 1985). Kamboureli wrote a book about returning to Greece, and Kroetsch wrote a book about Smaro, returning to Greece. Hers less a journal of longing than a book of exploration, retracing her steps and working out what she’d learned. “December 5, 1983. Winnipeg is my home. I am writing my dissertation on the Canadian long poem. I am married to a Canadian. I dream in English. I write in English. And I’ve become a landed immigrant today. A status that legalizes my feelings about this city, about Canada, that allows me to live permanently where I already feel at home. But this permanence is provisional. I inhabit a plain that has many edges.” Hers is a book that edges, as his does, toward their own wedding, his second. Compare what Kroetsch writes in his, “When you get to Sifnos, take another look at the house / you mentioned. The one by the chapel. The one that you / said we might be able to rent a year from now.” to a section near the end of Kamboureli’s poem-journal:

June 6, 1982

Our plans for our Greek trip get more and more complicated. Now we’ve added to them the complications of a wedding between a Greek and a Canadian. We’re all frantic, but the wedding, of course, may never occur since none of the local authorities can provide us with the papers that the Greek church demands before it issues the wedding license. In the meantime, father has sent me the banns already printed in Macedonia. And mother has included in his letter the design of the wedding dress that my godmother has offered to make for me.

I phoned them: hold your horses.

I wonder, whose horses were whom? If these the same horses Kroetsch wrote about crossing the High Level Bridge in TheStudhorse Man (Simon and Schuster, 1969)? Most likely, not. In one of his later collections, The Hornbooks of Rita K (University of Alberta Press, 2001), he wrote his male narrator in love with a disappeared poet, the unpublished Rita Kleinhart. Unfulfilled, a desire that could never achieve, be disrupted, interrupted, or even deflected. It remains what it is, the perfect image of desire. It remains a love held in amber.

It is so much easier to love someone who is gone, and can never change. How immature, archivist. Perhaps I read too much into? Perhaps this is unfair, on my part. He writes:

We write as a way of inviting love. Each text is a request that says, please, love me a little.

Rita Kleinhart was an admirer of snow. Snow, she remarks, is the caress of impossible meanings. Snow is closure without ending. Snow is the veil that lets us see the shape of the dream.

Forever returning to the beginning, begin again, was Kroetsch less confident once he approached those inevitable ends? In the collection that follows, The Snowbird Poems (University of Alberta Press, 2004), another male narrator, Snowbird, writes out conversation to and with a woman, but this time a travel companion, Henrietta. They write out their names on the beach, in the sand. Writing footprints. They move as a marriage does, would.