m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : r e c e n t _ e s s a y s

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers, created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, our site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

We've nearly sixty essays posted! Our most recent include:

Amy Leblanc on Jeanette Winterson [pictured]

Arielle Burgdorf on Liz Worth

Eve Rachele Sanders on Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë

Michelle Butler Hallett on Flannery O’Connor

Michele Sharpe on Befriending Jane Austen’s Emma

Kim Fahner on Bronwen Wallace

Ronna Bloom on Rhea Tregebov

Drew Kiser on Sylvia Plath

Please check out our submissions page for more information (we are constantly seeking submissions! we even pay a small amount!). We've also a Facebook page!

We are also still accepting signed books for our upcoming fundraiser! and check out our Patreon page! All donations go directly to paying contributors.

Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir

Dear Current Occupant—House we all shared on Forgotten Street

Ten people in a three-bedroom upper suite. Vancouver Special. The walls covered in tiny fingerprints. Bugs in the bed, crumbs on the stove, broken Transformers and Lego pieces, and Cheerios and dirty mismatched socks scattered on the beige carpet. I kept my small treasures under my pillow. We were visitors there. On a small couch with sixty dollars under my pillow, I slept. Never saw the shadow of a body get closer. Never saw her walk away when she had second thoughts at the last minute. Never felt the hand that reached underneath my head. Never felt the tingling of fingers accidentally grazing the small hairs behind my ear. Never heard the rustling of bills between sly fingers. Never woke up to see the sadness in the whites of eyes or the remorse as she placed the money in her pocket. Never saw her turn back and double-check that I was still asleep and maybe even feel sorry enough to offer me a short, warm kiss on my cheek or tuck the edge of the blue blanket into the crook of my sweaty neck. I didn’t wake up in time.

The latest in Book*hug’s essais series is Vancouver writer and editor Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018), a creative non-fiction lyric exploration of her years growing up through the twenty houses she eventually lived in with her mother and brother in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The short prose-sections of Dear Current Occupant work through poverty, dislocation and racism (as a mixed East Indian/Black child), attempting to capture the nebulous idea of home her experiences provided. Composed as a series of letters, predominantly written to the current occupants of the variety of buildings they lived in, from rentals to squats, Knight displays, with a deceptive ease through some remarkably difficult material, how it might be possible to acknowledge and explore one’s past without being overcome by it. As is already obvious, this is a book about survival, and Knight does so honestly, unflinchingly and gracefully, and yet, there remain elements that any survivor can’t help but carry, reminiscent of British writer Jeanette Winterson, when she wrote of her Pentecostal mother in her own, more straightforward memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Knopf, 2011) [see my review of such here]; Winterson’s mother would regularly lock the young Jeanette out of the house overnight, causing her adult self to still keep her own kitchen jar perpetually ajar. What does the idea of home mean to someone perpetually in motion? At the opening of the “Endnotes,” Knight writes:

home. A one-syllable word like walls, doors, and roof. A house. Something many of us take for granted. I was drawn to the concept of home and belonging for many years, and bits and pieces of both came to life in my first book, Braided Skin (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2015). After this dip-my-toes-in-the-water book, I saw an unfinished thread poking out from within the pages, a story, a missing piece that needed to be told in another form, another book. Dear Current Occupant has been in the works for many years, even before Braided Skin, but it took that first book to pave the way. It took reading and listening to many other voices speak of home and lack thereof for me to start piecing together the fragments of home I have so desperately been looking for.

Genres are crossing, bending, merging, melting, and morphing into new subgenres, and this is what happened with Dear Current Occupant. And just like genres, the same can be said when it comes to belonging—the bending. I can never let go of the bending. The squeezing to fit into a place, a home. How many doors have to slam shut? How many windows can I look out of, trusting that the view will remain the same?

The book exists in short bursts of prose, composed akin to a series of photographs; not composed in any particular order than that of memory, moving through and across time, experience and stories as they occur, from having to move suddenly, and with no more than what she could carry, to her mother’s continued drug use and an adult stranger’s hand upon her knee. As she responded as part of an interview with Amber Dawn for PRISM International:

Trauma affects memory. Memories are fragmented, distorted, unorganized, cracked, so that’s how I wrote the book. I thought about the ordering of the sections, which piece would lead into the next and why, but not in terms of chronological time. There were two sections I wanted to act as book ends, and I needed it to be clear that I was an adult in these. In the first piece, I am an adult going back to one of the old places and the young girl I am watching is me. I am in a non-verbal, observant conversation with myself. In the last piece, I am moving out of the last house I lived in with my mother. And I am writing to her, but I am writing to myself.

As much as this is a book of survival, part of the strength of this work is in knowing just how little the perspectives within have been explored, knowing that there are most likely numerous children who have been raised and perhaps still exist in poverty and uncertainty, whether in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, or anywhere else. What makes this book so engaging is in knowing that Knight writes from a perspective built from the inside, and not from the outside, peering in; and knowing that she managed to pull herself out, and not only survive, but thrive. And, throughout the events described in her memoir, this is a book that works, just as much, to honour the strength of her mother, writing:

Most people may read this book and think, wow, that’s really sad, or they may say they feel bad that a little girl experienced these things. But that’s not the purpose of this book. It took me twenty-five years to figure out that my mother saved my life. And even though it was most likely not her intention, she showed me what could happen if I didn’t have a dream. She showed me what could happen if I didn’t work hard. She showed me what could happen if I let the wrong people in, or left the door open for too long maybe, for me, she was the only one who could do that.

m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : e i g h t _ r e c e n t _ e s s a y s

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers, created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, our site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

We've now thirty essays posted! Our most recent include:

t thilleman on jj hastain

Sylvester Green on Jeanette Winterson

Nicole Brewer on Anakana Schofield and Miriam Toews

Kim Fahner on Mary Oliver

Sarah Cook on Anne Sexton

Andrea Nicki on Elly Danica

Sue Rainsford on Helen Cixous, Eimear McBride, Bhanu Kapil and Lidia Yuknavitch

Lorin Medley on H.D.

Please check out our submissions page for more information (we are seeking submissions! we even pay a small amount!). We've also a Facebook page!

We are also still accepting signed books for our upcoming fundraiser! and check out our new Patreon page! All donations go directly to paying contributors.

Priscila Uppal, projection: encounters with my runaway mother

I have always avoided talking about my mother. Mostly because when people ask “What did your mother say?” or “What does your mother do for a living?” or “When will I meet your mother?” they assume I have one. And not only that I have one, but also that answers to these questions about my mother will be quick, clear, and simple. And yet, who has a simple relationship with one’s mother, even if that mother did raise you and support you and is still an integral part of your life? Nevertheless, when people innocently ask about my mother, they don’t realize they are unlatching a gate to a house I have kept closed for years. It’s not fit for living in. There’s no one hiding out in the attic or rotting in the basement, no bones buried under the floorboard or secret wills tucked into pantry tiles; in fact, quite the opposite. The house is empty, swept clean, sanitized. No furniture, no gardens, not even a box of baking soda in the fridge. And I like it that way.

From Toronto poet, fiction writer, critic and editor Priscila Uppal, raised in Ottawa and currently a professor at York University, comes an incredible memoir: projection: encounters with my runaway mother (Toronto ON: Dundurn Press, 2013). Already a finalist for both the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction as well as the Governor General’s Literary Awards, projection:encounters with my runaway mother begins with a background on Uppal’s immediate family. The blurb on the book’s leaf tells it best: “In 1977, Priscila Uppal’s father swallowed contaminated water in Antigua, and within 48 hours was a quadriplegic. Priscila was two years old. Five years later, her mother, Theresa, drained the bank accounts, including those of her two children, and disappeared to Brazil. After attempting to abduct her children twice, Priscila’s mother had no further contact with the family. Twenty years later, Priscila happened upon her mother’s website and, a few weeks later, she summoned the nerve to contact the woman who’d abandoned her as a child. After a few awkward phone calls and e-mails, a trip was arranged.” I’ve always been amazed as Uppal as a positive force, both personally and professionally, as well as her impressive output, so I can’t even imagine how difficult such an upbringing could have been, or just how it might have affected someone less willful.

            I want you to understand my psychology.

            Good. That’s exactly what I want too, whatever that means. This is not a typical mother-daughter gallery chat, but a case study. I want to know what makes her tick, what keeps her living when she claims she’d rather die, what thoughts fill her day, what thoughts fill her night, what she has done with the past—whether she has hidden those skeletons, if she’s dressed them up in parasols or Arctic snowsuits, if she ever takes out memories like antique cutlery and sets a special table for them.

            I do not like to fight for things. If someone wants to fight me, I hide.

            She doesn’t believe she’s cruel; although she won’t use the word, she’s labelled herself a coward. It’s the psychology of someone who, as a child, never had to fight for what she wanted. Faced with the possibility of competition, she bolts to avoid conflict, confrontation, failure. Whereas her children fought for everything they have.

Uppal structures the chapters of the memoir through film, using one of the things she and her mother have in common—a love of cinema—as a way to ease into territory that can’t help but be extremely loaded with emotional difficulty. Chapters wrap themselves around a dozen or so features, from Blade Runner and Maid in Manhatten to Mommie Dearest, God Is Brazilian, Throw Momma from the Train and The Purple Rose of Cairo, a structure used effectively to propel the narrative from one chapter into another. The book focuses on the twelve days Uppal spend, solo, travelling south to Brazil to stay with her mother. After decades without any contact at all, suddenly Uppal is under her mother’s mercy in hotels, her home, and finally surrounded by her mother’s family, with little more than a notebook to protect her. Throughout the book, Uppal describes responses by her mother that are quite baffling, and even terrifying, and one can only admire Uppal’s courage to put herself through such a complicated process; and I understand fully, having recently completed such a project myself, that the only way for some of us to work through such a territory is to write it out. Uppal’s exploration is incredibly articulate, open and honest about herself, her mother and just what it is she learns through the process of interacting with a woman who, it becomes increasingly apparent, refuses any responsibility, negativity or blame, and won’t even read a book with an unhappy ending (although Uppal’s maternal grandmother is an absolute delight). As narrator, Uppal refuses easy blame and finger-pointing, attempting as best as she can to avoid easy judgment, and instead, showcasing a wary generosity, an odd humour and a scientific approach in attempting to comprehend the impossible: how any woman could abandon her children. projection: encounters with my runaway mother compares in interesting ways to how other writers, specifically female writers, who have written of their mothers, from Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Knopf, 2011) [see my review of such here] or Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart’s numerous accounts of her relationship with her mother, including the unfinished Dig a Grave and Let Us Bury Our Mother. Given the nature of discovery, this work could even compare to Monica Kidd’s memoir of genealogical discovery, seeking out her great-grandparents in any other woman: an uncommon biography (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2008) [see my review of such here]. Uppal’s projection: encounters with my runaway mother is a brave, heartfelt, thorough and unforgettable memoir, and one that needs to be read, whatever the nature of your relationship with parents or children. I have been recommending this book for some time.

I’m starting to wonder how much of my mother’s psyche is elusive to me because of culture rather than nature. If I learned one thing on a six-week cross-Canada trip I took starting in Victoria, British Columbia, and finishing on Prince Edward Island, it’s that landscape and environment are responsible for everything: weather, diet, clothing, industry, economy, and especially personality. If you live among the Rocky Mountains, you can’t help but climb them, spend your days looking up, seeking adventure. If you live where you can see for miles without a single obstruction, not a hill or tower or farm, you become a master of patience, of seasoning planning. If you live on an island where the soil is so red it literally stains your skin, no matter where you travel that sand never rubs off and you always feel homesick. São Paolo’s commercial hustle and bustle and arts institutions suit my mother’s hunger for constant entertainment, endless sensory input to fuel her fantasy life. Brasilia seems to feed her need for order and predictability. But she grew up in Rio de Janeiro, I can’t forget this, a city with a reputation for complete disorder and dysfunction and a mess of contradictions: a city of brutal violence on the one hand and the largest dance party in the world on the other, with one of the tallest art deco sculptures of Christ on top of a massive hill, watching over its mansions and apartment complexes and millions living a precarious existence in the favelas day and night. The old capital city. My mother’s family one of the first to move from one capital to another. One of the first to exchange one set of dreams for another. And proud to do so. When my mother first set foot in this futuristic city raised from dust in the desert, she would have been just a wide-eyed little girl, her own dreams like the new species of plants, just beginning to take root under the sun.

Mark Goldstein, Form of Forms

I began this book in the fall of 2002. Initially, it was entitled From Shore to Shore. And it was so named when I traveled to Sage Hill in the summer of 2005 to work on the manuscript with Nicole Brossard, who gave me the courage to continue writing it. Winter of 2006, I workshopped the text in Toronto with Betsy Warland who taught me how to breathe the line. From 2009 until pre-publication in 2012, I shared it with my generous and supportive editors, Phil Hall, Jaclyn Piudik and Nick Drumbolis. And so this book became Form of Forms. (“Acknowledgements”)

I’m intrigued by what Toronto writer and designer Mark Goldstein says he learned by Vancouver writer Betsy Warland in the acknowledgements of his third trade poetry collection, Form of Forms (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012): “who taught me how to breathe the line.” The long poem/book Form of Forms has a generous amount of breath-space, something that few Canadian poets really understand how to use properly, but for notable exceptions such as Warland, Sylvia Legris and the late bpNichol. Such an amount of space to breathe in a poem is a rare quantity, and Goldstein’s poem understands not only breath, but the space required to hold and release that same breath.

            there is

            a yearning

                        for that which is

                        feared

                        a feeling

Stretching out into poem-sections—“Creation,” “Preservation,” “Destruction” and “Quiescence”—Goldstein’s Form of Forms is highly charged, and the poem composes its own breakdown before attempting to re-assemble, through both form and content. Mark Goldstein, we learn, is adopted, and attempting to reconcile exactly what that might mean for who he is, who he was, and possibly, who he might have been. There are directions pointed to of attempts to learn, many of which are thwarted through various agencies, or provide simply not enough information, or the answers he may have been seeking. Dislocation: the entire collection/poem is built upon it. The topic of adoption, being the child of adoption and seeking out that empty space is certainly an emotionally-loaded one, but the work itself is understated, responding and recording, even sketching out a kind of calm.

start with a lie

“adoption is

natural”

    (it goes without

      saying)

a sequence of telling

the simple

child

may believe      everyone

“adopted”

This is Goldstein’s third trade poetry collection, after the volume After Rilke (BookThug, 2008) and Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2010), and Form of Forms merely reconfirms Goldstein as a poet of book-length projects. Composing his first trade collection through the lens of Jack Spicer and Rilke, and his second through the lens of Paul Celan’s Atemwende, both collections are thematically built, and move through the work of other poets, both removing the author, and centring the author through a particular kind of camouflage. In Form of Forms, Goldstein has composed a poem through the lens of his own doubling, writing against that as-yet-undiscovered part of himself, making it difficult to hide, but easy enough to distract, or even self-create. There’s a passage by Jeanette Winterson I seem to be quoting endlessly lately that seems to apply here as well:

Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.

It’s almost as though he has been moving further towards a comfort with a particular kind of grounding through being groundless. As Goldstein wrote in the acknowledgments of Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath: “One would like to feign accuracy where there is none […]. In exhausting this hope, we need no longer circle the poem seeking rest having accepted its groundlessness.” Form of Forms struggles with the narrator’s sense of self (can we presume the narrator and the author share word for word all?) but ends up creating that self through the process. This is Goldstein not only composing his Form of Forms but as a reformation, after too many questions have not yet been answered. In the end, for both poem and the sense of the narrator’s self, structure must come from within, the most heartbreaking and uplifting conclusion Mark Goldstein’s Form of Form knows only too well.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson

The more I read the more I fought against the assumption that literature is for the minority – of a particular education or class. Books were my birthright too. I will not forget my excitement at discovering that the earliest recorded poem in the English language was composed by a herdsman in Whitby around AD 680 (‘Caedmon’s Hymn’) when St Hilda was the abbess of Whitby Abbey.

            Imagine it…a woman in charge and an illiterate cowhand making a poem of such beauty that educated monks wrote it down and told it to visitors and pilgrims.

            It is a lovely story – Caedmon would rather be with the cows than with people, and he doesn’t know any poetry or songs, and so at the end of the feasts in the abbey, when all are invited to sing or recite, Caedmon always rushes back to the cows where he can be on his own. But that night, an angel comes and tells him to sing – if he can sing to the cows, he can sing to the angel. Caedmon says sadly that he doesn’t know any songs, but the angel tells him to sing one anyway – about the creation of the world. And Caedmon opens his mouth and there is the song. (Have a look at an early account of this in Bede: History of the English Church and Peoples.)

For years now, one of my favourite fiction writers has been British writer Jeanette Winterson, author of the infamous first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985) and subsequent Written on the Body (1993). Of her books, some of my favourites include more recent works, such as Lighthousekeeping (2004) and Weight (2005). I was less taken with The Stone Gods (2007), despite enjoying some passages, and even enjoying the connections to one of her earlier works, Boating for Beginners (1985) (which is a very neat book to compare to, say, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage). After numerous works of fiction, as well as children’s books and screenplays, comes a memoir of growing up, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Knopf, 2011). Named for a phrase her adoptive mother, a Pentacostal, said to her, this is an odd, unsettling and frank memoir. Through the memoir, Winterson attempts to come to terms with the brutal way she was treated by her parents, including being shunned for her sexuality, diminished for being adopted, having her books burned, and regularly being locked out of the house. She writes of working to come to terms with her parents, and even her birth mother, once she is finally able to begin the emotionally and bureaucratically difficult process of seeking her out. She writes of her adoptive mother’s faith warped into madness, and the abilities she developed early on to protect herself, from secretly reading books from the library, to her first romantic stirrings. How does one learn to develop after such deep betrayals from not only one mother, but seemingly two? The first betrayal is the hardest to fathom, and the most difficult to transcend, especially from that person to whom our first bonds are forged.

Flash forward to 2007 and I have done nothing about finding my past. It isn’t ‘my past’, is it? I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn’t a method; it’s me.

            I was writing a novel called The Stone Gods. It is set in the future, though the second section is set in the past. It imagines our world in its protean state being discovered by an advanced but destructive civilisation whose own planet is dying. A mission is sent to Planet Blue. The mission does not return.

            Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as memory and warning.

            The Passion: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’

            Written on the Body: ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’

            The PowerBook: ‘To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.’

            Weight: ‘The free man never thinks of escape.’

            The Stone Gods: ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.’

            In my previous novel, Lighthousekeeping, I had been working with the idea of a fossil record. Now I was there again – the sense of something written over, yes, but still distinct. The colours and forms revealed under ultraviolet light. The ghost in the machine that breaks through into the new recording.

            What was the ‘imprint’?

Winterson writes of her difficulties with her mother, and the loss she felt at being adopted, raised in a working-class industrial town would be able to escape at all, let alone through the salve of reading that turned into writing, and forced to leave home at sixteen because she was in love with a woman. What else to say? This is a striking, and brutally honest work that struck deep, even as I work on my own work-in-progress dealing with my own mother [see a link to such here]. When I originally read an excerpt of the book in The Guardian, I was struck by this passage:

Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.

Now that I’ve gone through the book as a whole, another passage strikes, also:

But mother is our first love affair. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breast. Her body.

            And if we hate her later, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, where do we find her again?