unidentified fiction remains and the true nature of banff

I recently spent a week at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity as part of celebrating the University of Alberta's Writer-in-Residence 50th anniversary [and there was even a livestreamed showcase reading by the group of us, which I posted about over here]. I honestly can't fully process all the adventures during that week, with a group of writers it would have been stellar to see even individually, let alone as part of a group. And did I mention I briefly got to meet Daniel MacIvor? (and yes, I know it's a Brad Fraser title I mangled, above). MacIvor was in Twitch City, you know, which was a small work of genius. And did you see him recently in an episode of Law and Order: Toronto? I got to hang out with Michael Barnholden and Adèle Barclay, meet writers such as Ryanne Kap, Sharanpal Ruprai and Conor Kerr. The wealth of the company was staggering.

We had a week, most of which was our own. We caught meals, although I was at breakfast first, most mornings. My body said, 8am, time to get up [although post-karaoke, I missed breakfast altogether, which allowed ryan fitzpatrick that morning's first slot]. One morning I even managed an hour's work before leaving my room, and another, about half an hour's work before anyone else showed up for coffee and morning what-nots. While there, I was attempting to further my novel-in-progress, the one that rests somewhere between On Beauty (2014) and the follow-up, downstream from Missing Persons (2009); a novel that follows the threads of a handful of folk who don't necessarily interact, but exist within the same stretch of relative time. I hadn't presumed I could finish it, but after a week sitting within its pages (and at least four days prior attempting to re-enter), I think I can now actually see that light at the end of the tunnel. The week included a planned dinner or two, a karaoke night (and second round, given it was so successful) and a trip to town (which I did skip, needing to sit at my desk). We had our big showcase reading, which was incredible.

J.R. Carpenter [see my review of Carpenter's latest here] has a collaborative app you should check out, This Is Not A Good Sign, a curious eco-poetic of phrases one can overlay atop photographs, presumably of landscapes or whatever else, I was playing with while there. I spent the week taking the occasional picture as part of such, a number of which I did post over at Instagram, and am hoping to continue on same, here and there. It was very cool to hang with ryan fitzpatrick [see my review of fitzpatrick's latest here], get some good conversations with Fred Wah and Daphne Marlatt, get to learn (or learn better) folk such as Conor Kerr, Cody Caetano, Joshua Whitehead [see my review of Whitehead's latest here], Jason Purcell [see my review of Purcell's latest here]. Caetano's memoir is so remarkably, powerfully, good. I read much of it on the flight out. And so many other folk were around, there, participating, wandering through or wandering by. You probably already know I produced a handful of chapbook titles for the week as well, by myself, Fred Wah, Daphne Marlatt, J.R. Carpenter, ryan fitzpatrick and Derek Beaulieu. Copies were distributed free to all the participants, with a small handful left over for the reading event (further copies will be distributed through the University of Alberta Department of English and Film Studies, prod at Jordan Abel if you wish for copies, he has a bunch).

I worked to further this novel, as well as attempting a "Banff notebook" project, akin to "the green notebook," a journal-essay stretch from that week I'm still working to hammer into some kind of publishable form, with the hopes to start posting excerpts from same across my substack real soon. There were drafts of a poem, however slow. Sketch-notes. There might be something else, also. I am thinking through the bounds of a poem, certainly.

This was my first time spending any length of time at Banff Centre (beyond two days in May 2008 I don't really count, as I never quite landed and didn't know anything or anyone, so kept fallow).

There were quiet conversations and loud gatherings, languid stretches of walking solo, working solo, walking to town. I made a bad joke at a museum [a solid joke, really], and lost my breath singing, and walking, and standing [higher altitude, you know]. I took a big swing attempting a song from Frozen 2 at karaoke, which didn't quite land (but big swings are the point, certainly). I saw two full days of snowfall, and an overcast so complete, they put the mountains away for safety, only returning them once it cleared. I stayed out too late with writers, and the one night all the writers crashed, I stayed out too late with playwrights. I bought a t-shirt the wrong size, and had dessert with every meal. I got some nice time with Derek Beaulieu, and saw his office, far more ordered than had it been mine. 

Oh, and our final night there, as Thomas Wharton, Marilyn Dumont and I were walking through town back from dinner, catching a group singing loudly hey now, you're a rock star, get your game on, hey, and realizing the group was all dressed as characters from the Shrek animated films. A bridal party, clearly. Did Wharton take this picture? Dumont at the front, there. The bride (dressed as the prince, centre) was so proud of the fact that this was all her idea. Don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. In hindsight, I did wonder, what might have been the theme of the wedding?

Jason Purcell, Crohnic

 

On the banks of the North Saskatchewan I shed
my velvet having to rest again on the white powder 

line snow like a tablet crushed and blown toward the crisp
blank future a shrinking 

place where health and death are the same
temperature where I am calculated and reduced so 

there is less of me to keep alive on the banks
of the North Saskatchewan I sat down and sacrificed

And so reads the opening page, the opening passage, of the second full-length collection by Edmonton poet Jason Purcell, the long poem Crohnic (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025), a collection that follows their full-length debut, Swollening (Arsenal Pulp, 2022) [see my review of such here]. Documenting the landscape of the experience of navigating endless (timeless) time spent in hospital across a diagnosis and treatment of Crohn’s disease, Purcell’s book-length lyric suite, their long poem, articulates an experience from deep within it through a stitch of lyric bursts, of fragments. “Lindsay gives me the idea for this book.” the second page, the second passage, begins, as Purcell speaks of the original prompt by one of their nurses. As Purcell writes, Crohnic writes of and around the experience of “a severe and long-undiagnosed case of Crohn’s disease, [as] each day I swallow down pills and every month I receive infusions by IV that whittle me down but keep me going in the meantime. Like Lindsay says, intense and persistent medical intervention can feel hard to handle.” Purcell writes passages, lyric bursts and broken lines, composed from within a kind of ongoingness, offering medical updates and snapshots of the river valley just outside the window. As they write, early on: “on the banks of the North Saskatchewan I am too // human and I impose that on everything that isn’t too / clear-cut what ill-suited gaze did I carry down and fix // on this landscape its residents the narcissism of being / damaged and thinking the rest is too // a prescribing cold reaches toward and embraces / me the silver skin lifts and peels from the birch // at my side mosses turn their slow growth north / an animal leaves its fur in the branches.”

The winding architecture of the hand
and wrist hanging from the dorsal venous
arch it crumbles
distributes strain I remember
walking beneath it and hearing
a brook’s jewelled noise against stone
somewhere underground deep
in my body where there is some
reservoir I must draw from so long
as I live in this temporary structure

The collage-journal of the book’s overall structure provides a curious book-length tapestry, reminiscent, somehow (of all things), Vancouver writer George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970), as both write through a sequence, a discovery poem, of loosely-connected self-contained narrative bursts across a larger, however loose, project-length narrative. Across their text, Purcell repeats the idea and image of “architecture,” reinforcing the central elements of their narrative structure: a sketchbook of notes while feeling trapped within both their own body and the hospital building. “it is better to stay quiet and allow / all of this to happen I shrink the architecture // of this place loses shape / through each swinging doorway are spaces that grow,” they write, some twenty pages in. These are poems held in temporal space, composed from within a perpetual, endless immediate, where the only passage of time comes through nursing shifts, the weather outside, or the shifts of the seasons.

Looking out to a place I can’t reach
on foot until the snow comes 

under me are the tall generations
of conifers whose generations don’t go 

so far back only as far
as the trampling things grow 

undisturbed far away neglect
blossoms unexpected 

richness the northern bog
violet reseeds its mauves 

across the bare gut plain
over the horizon 

that colours the receding evening’s gaze
neither malign nor benign.

Crohnic follows a loose trajectory of multiple poetry collections addressing issues of illness, whether short-term or long term, moving into elements of disability poetics articulated by prior titles including their own full-length debut, as well as Calgary poet nikki reimer’s [sic] (Calgary AB: Frontenac House, 2010) [see my review of such here], the late Los Angeles County writer Hillary Gravendyk’s (1979-2014) Harm (Richmond CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2012) [see my review of such here], Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s departures (Winnipeg MN: Turnstone Press, 2016) [see my review of such here], Montreal poet Lauren Turner’s The Only Card in a Deck of Knives (Hamilton ON: Wolsak and Wynn, 2020) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Therese Estacion’s Phantompains (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2021) [see my review of such here], the reissue of Philadelphia poet and publisher Brian Teare’s fifth trade poetry collection, The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2015; New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Kingston, Ontario poet Ashley-Elizabeth Best’s Bad Weather Mammals (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2024) [see my review of such here], Calgary poet Amy LeBlanc’s I used to live here (Guelph ON: The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025) [see my review of such here], Toronto poet Jessica Popeski’s The Problem with Having a Body (Guelph ON: Gordon Hill Press, 2025) [see my review of such here] and even Ottawa poet Christine McNair’s hybrid/memoir, Toxemia (Book*hug, 2024) [see my essay on such here]. The structure of writing extended passages from one’s hospital bed, as well, is reminiscent of Dennis Cooley’s work during a hospital stay after a burst appendix (the central core of the collection departures), elements of which he first articulated across the “new” of his sunfall: new and selected poems 1980-1996 (Toronto ON: Anansi, 1996). Or, as Purcell writes:

But all the while, outside my window, winter goes on, teaching me how to rest. From my apartment perched in the trees of amiskwaciwâskahikan where I convalesce, where I look out onto the North Saskatchewan and her river valley, I learn how to wait. The trees lining the water lose their bulk and stand thin at the banks. The river freezes over with psoriatic plaque. Animals borrow, storing and hunting, knowing not to expend. Outside the city bogs and muskeg bubble, cradling that which slowly decomposes. Winter breathes slowly in sacred dormancy.

I am trying to learn an obvious lesson: everything is entangled in a relationship with life and death. Decay feeds life, and the non-human world does not seem to enforce strict division between these orders; life and death are both a kind of flourishing, co-creating possibilities. Winter puts us to sleep so we can be reborn. I take my prescribed and measured harms so that I can live more fully. The river flows, sheets over, changes state, and then

Jason Purcell, swollening

 

fertility

I pleasure over a row of white caps containing themselves. I tongue my own holes. Dislodge a tooth with a filling in it and grind it out to see its cavern, pushing against the walls of enamel with my thumb until the entire structure of the filling crumbles. Gape it enough that it splits in two, a thick rush of saliva on the tongue, alkaline and sweet. Holding my own dead self in my hands. An artifact of neglect that rots and teems with life. The slick of the mouth, its dirty floor mushrooming, iridescent beetles just under the log, under the filling’s wet dark suddenly lifted, skeletal scuttling from the searching sun, from the rising dental light.

From Edmonton poet and bookseller Jason Purcell comes the full-length debut, swollening (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022), a collection that “rests at the intersection of queerness and illness, staking a place for the queer body that has been made sick through living in this world.” swollening is built as three sections of first person lyric narratives, and Purcell composes poems that echo and flow into each other; poems that ripple across surfaces, running deep into each other across the length of the lake of this book. “Even this memory is queer.” he writes, to close the poem “North of Nipissing Beach,” “These are the terms of this space.” And through such, Purcell sets down the terms of his lyric from the offset: composing poems that swirl around a central core of illness, writing a devastating array of dental pain and carnage (I can’t tell if it is irony or purpose that has me posting this review on the morning of my own latest dental appointment), but one that utilizes illness as a way through which to examine what feels the book’s true purpose: to examine and articulate loss, grief and growing pains. Purcell writes the breaks, pains and pauses that come with simply becoming an eventual self-realized adtult (including the threads of growing up and coming out), and allowing grief and trauma its own space to move through, and be moved through in turn. Purcell writes on first loves, masculinity, a father’s response and a mother’s love, and the distance of siblings. “How to retrace / a relationship and then to stay present?” he asks, to close the poem “Kids in the back seat,” “How to repair? I always push away / from the pain, but she reaches through and can see / me, can connect what I can’t by a very long road.” swollening is not simply a book around illness and pain but a collection of poems on attempting to understand the path travelled-to-date, sketched across childhood recollection, burgeoning queerness and heartbreak, composed as much as a way through understanding and a way forward as an articulation of where he currently stands, now.