Sachiko Murakami, Render

 

In my relapse dreams I am in Vancouver,

hiding a bundle in my shirt like
I’ve been picking roadside blackberries

the line for the bathroom a Möbius strip
of disinterested friends

my reasoning too circuitous to figure out
how to get all of what I’m hiding up my nose before I’m caught

 

When I wake I’m sober.
I think. Yes.

The important part of dream
is that I wake up clean

& drenched in sweat (“THE BIG ONE: FIELD NOTES”)

Poet and editor Sachiko Murakami’s fourth full-length poetry collection is Render (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), a lyric of nerve and raw emotion, writing out “a searing exploration of addiction, recovery, and trauma.” Her title suggests the paired ideas of depicting and tearing apart, which this book very much is, a depiction of something immediately after being torn to shreds, and the slow process of picking up and thoughts of reassembly. The rawness here propels much of the collection, one that jokes and shrugs and rails while radiating trauma and anxiety. “Death can’t find her in the back of the closet.” she writes, as part of the sequence, “THANATOPHOBIA 1,” a title that translates to a “fear of death.” “Just kidding! Death can find her / anywhere.” This book flails and disseminates, moving through an articulation of rawness through lyric as a way to, perhaps, slog and slough through to the other side of recovery. “I loved him more than I loved poetry.” she writes, to open “TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE.” “I loved cocaine more than I loved poetry. / When I told him I loved him, I meant I love you more than cocaine.” Through Murakami, the question is posed: by depicting and articulating trauma, can this exist as worthwhile art? Can this exist as a way through which to process trauma into recovery and whatever lies beyond?

It could have ended there:

Bottom as in the end of doing harm. Bottom as in no further passage.

Scraping at earth as though there were a way to hell.
You keep digging because you hope
there might be a glint of violence
that will tear you open the way

God tears some open. A cut of red.
A crack in the wall. But this time
there’s nearly 

no morning at all. (“BREATHER”)

It is curious that one could say that much of Murakami’s work could be considered in the realm of “response,” something, arguably, all writing is, I suppose. Her debut collection, The Invisibility Exhibit (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2008), explored Vancouver’s murdered and missing women, issues of gendered and racial violence and cultural indifference; Rebuild (Talonbooks, 2011), explored the “Vancouver Special” and issues of housing, poverty, sameness and erasure; Get Me Out Of Here (Talonbooks, 2015) worked through the idea of arrival and departure, and whether the between-state is even anything at all. As she described Get Me Out Of Here as part of a 2015 interview I did with her for Jacket2: “It’s a book about wanting to leave, really: the self, the present, the here-and-now. How does that manifest? Through self-harm, through disassociation, through love, through poetry. Airports provide a useful setting for thinking through this.”

Murakami does pull apart the elements of her life and experience associated with trauma, with loss; from her addiction to familial loss, composing poems as a series of individual studies, attempting, perhaps, to put them on paper so as to better comprehend, and thus, reduce their destructive power. Writing around the death of her father in “I RETURN TO THE ISLAND / OF MY FATHER’S CHILDHOOD,” there is an enormous amount she attempts to unpack in a short space, as the poem opens:

I am heading inland from the safety of Long Harbour
with the body in the back seat wrapped in linen

ready for the family cremation.
The body of the island is wrapped in dusk,

Ready for the night’s throttle.
where their burned house was, a new house.

Slip through family history, a snag in the shoulder
where the memory was: a burned memory.

In the end, Murakami writes of a spirit and a temperament that, despite whatever she may have endured and how close she has come, refuses to give up, or give in. She moves forward, almost despite herself, into that fearful future, one that still holds a trauma that has yet to relinquish its grip. The fifth and final section, “STILL HERE,” includes the sequence “STILL, HERE,” a poem that writes of pregnancy, and new directions. “Just when you think / the days are the days / and you are fully in them // this / thick film of then // settles now / as it always did [.]” Perhaps trauma never entirely leaves, but needs to be simultaneously processed and endured; perhaps the full journey has yet to be travelled, but here her narrator is, writing it out, inch by lyric inch. The poem ends: “breathe through it // just like you did before [.]”

 

Writing is Hard : rob mclennan (interview re-post from 2016,

I wanted to re-post this interview I did back in 2016, originally conduced by the delightful and brilliant Toronto poet and editor Sachiko Murakami for her “Writing is Hard” project. The series was rare in that it openly worked to discuss difficulties that emerged for different writers as they worked their way through a life of literary production in Canada, and touched on numerous social, political and financial concerns so often overlooked, and under-discussed. Along with my interview, the site featured conversations with Nikki Reimer, Laura Broadbent, Anita Anand, Sarah Yi-Mei Tsiang, Vivek Shraya and Daniel Zomparelli. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown (to me, at least), the site has fallen off the internet, meaning the compiled interviews are no longer available. I enjoyed the series very much (it was such a great series!), and, quite selfishly, I suppose, I quite liked my interview as part of it, able to discuss certain things that I hadn’t before, or even since. [Although I should mention I havebeen interviewed many times over the years; see?]

I’m hoping some version of her site returns at some point, but in the meantime, I re-post 2016 my interview here (along with the corresponding selfie from my home office):

What’s the hardest thing about being a writer?

There are so many elements worth discussing: not necessarily as “difficulties,” but as things one must adapt to, with or against in order to be able to get to the work. As working artists, we are trouble-shooters, after all, even if for problems we first create: it is important to focus on solutions, as opposed to difficulties.

There is ego, certainly: that tricky balance of having enough to manage years’ worth of self-motivation before anything might actually be accomplished (the years of silence and apathy before a book might actually emerge in print) against getting a swelled head, which can often lead to interpersonal difficulties with other writers (and non-writers), and even bitterness down the road, when one doesn’t achieve the attentions or accolades one expects. I met a handful of older writers while in my twenties, seemingly on the far end of presuming they were working to achieve some kind of ‘status,’ that warned me away from wanting to walk down that same path. I’ve also worked very hard to avoid a variety of alpha-male ‘pissing matches,’ something that, thankfully, has occurred far less as I age. It gets very old very quickly, and wastes so much time and effort. The other side of the equation of “ego” is in having just enough to self-motivate (no-one cares if I stop, for example), a muscle I spent much of my twenties furiously developing. Having the farming background helped, knowing that my father didn’t wait for inspiration to milk the cows: he simply woke every morning and went to work. I forced myself into the daily routine, knowing it would be the only way I would accomplish anything at all. Who was it that said we fight laziness and lies in our search for the truth?

Neil Gaiman has discussed multiple times the benefits of a writing life, which I heartily agree with: we get to write whatever we want, however we want, and whenever we feel like it. It might seem overly simplistic, but it is basically true. The benefits (or drawbacks) of my Glengarry County “Protestant work ethic,” akin to what I’ve heard of Alice Munro as well, mean I work all the damned time. There was an article I once read that quoted Alice Munro’s daughter on Munro’s Ontario rural work-ethic: the response to something not working out was to do more work. My enthusiasms have to sustain me, because no-one else’s will (nor should they). jwcurry has repeated his main goal these days: “to remain interested.”

I’ve also been very conscious of not wishing to complain or vent about any of my frustrations that come with a choice to write full-time (publicly, I mean, whether on social media or anywhere else, as opposed to very close friends and/or spouse), whether working in so much solitude, frustrations around lack of money (or grants, or book sales) or the realization that books and writing emerge with very little attention (if at all). While I understand the purpose to such complaints, it always seems a bit precious (and one, I’ve realized since, very much steeped in elements of privilege, including my “white male-ness”: I have the option to write full-time). I remember John Metcalf writing moons ago in an essay his lack of patience for writer complaints about funding rejections: no-one is making you do this.

Sorry for the delay. I had a few projects I needed to get finished up and my conversations got stalled!

First of all, these conversations are founded on the idea that it's okay to complain and vent about frustrations that come with the choice to write. (Not necessarily full-time, as I and most of the people I'm talking to are not writing full-time). I do appreciate you acknowledging your privilege and I respect you for hesitating to chime in here, but this project needs breadth of experience, so I thought I would throw in one or two white, straight men for the diversity angle ;)

I want to hear more about your work ethic. I’ve had conversations with people about you in which we marvel about your energy, how much you are always doing. What kind of toll does that take on you? I certainly don’t have the energy to do as much as you do. I can barely work at a very low-stress day job for 7.25 hours two days a week without wanting to come home and put myself immediately to bed. When I get into a project I do get the energy to throw all of myself into it, but I eventually crash. But you seem to have been vibrating at a higher work-capacity than most humans for years. Do you ever just collapse into a puddle of rob and sleep for six days?

Puddle of sleep? Oh my, no. There isn’t time! “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” and all that. Most evenings I feel as though I should be doing “something,” whether posting a few more “12 or 20 questions” interviews, or folding and stapling (once I’ve managed to get the toddler fed, bathed and asleep), but simply can’t, for the sake of energy. About a third of any given sequence of evenings, these days at least, I’m unable to move. So I don’t.

I think in my twenties and thirties it took much more of a toll than it does now. I really do think I have the benefit of a farm upbringing (which also included thirteen years of piano lessons) that drove home (unconsciously, of course) the work-ethic. The eleven-year battle of wills between my mother and I over my thirteen years of piano lessons most likely strengthened the idea (she would not let me quit, so I refused to practice). Early into my writing attempts, also, I read a quote by Margaret Atwood that said if you expect full-time out of writing, you must put full-time into it. I thought that made perfect sense. I mean, I never wanted side-employment (nor did I wish to teach, which is part of why I never bothered with post-secondary). Why give my best energy to what I care about less? Why work a dumb-job for eight hours, and then give only my “remaining” energy to that thing I claim to love best of all? It simply made no sense, so I refused it. And yet, there were the complaints I’d receive from certain other writers in the community that I couldn’t (or shouldn’t) “write all the time,” and that I required an outside employment, otherwise my writing would suffer. Those arguments were thrown at me for years by a small few; some who continue to argue such. It only angers me. Bring it up once (maybe); make your argument (and make a real argument, not just a complaint), and move on. I’m tired of hearing it. I write.

I’ve never held an office job: I worked in a restaurant as a bus-boy until I was twenty-one or twenty-two (training teenagers to do the same, who were then gifted my shifts). From twenty-one to twenty-four, I ran a home day-care with my daughter Kate and two other kids, so I could afford to stay home, and look after her while my then-partner worked (this would be my last tangible experience with “employment”). I was ten hours a day, five days a week with three toddlers, and writing three nights a week in a coffeeshop from 7pm to midnight. I pushed and pushed and pushed. There was no social life, but for the occasional public reading I’d attend and/or organized (sort of where I am now, I suppose).

Post-daycare, there were the years I had just enough to purchase a coffee, so I did, sitting my daily five hours in the Dunkin’ Donuts on Bank Street scribbling out poems and reviews (I sat there six days a week, five hours a day from May 1994 to June 2000). I ate little, and wrote lots. There was walking into the Ottawa Public Library to borrow a roll of masking tape to put my black high-tops back together, because the bottoms of my shoes were coming off. There was the year I made (according to my taxes) only $2,500 in total, which resulted in eviction, and subsequently living in a friend’s basement near the airport for a month or two. In hindsight, it sounds quite mad: the belligerent will-power, despite lacks of publishing, grants and other tangible attentions. I would spend the last of my money photocopying chapbooks, thus forcing myself to sell two copies a day for the sake of food, and maybe a pint at the pub, where I was attempting to work on fiction every evening, from 5pm until I simply couldn’t afford to continue sitting there. There was the occasional chapbook I could exchange for a pint with one of the owners of The Dominion Tavern, down in the Byward Market. For nearly twenty years, it was only through the semi-annual ottawa small press book fair that I would allow myself a small moment of stress-free humanity: post-fair, we would retire to the pub for food and drink, and I would order like a person without even thinking about money. Somehow, six months of furious work amid poverty for the sake of a single, stress-free meal I’d paid for myself felt an incredible luxury, and an incredible relief.

There were opportunities, certainly, I wasn’t able to present to my first child; although whenever money did appear I always provided them a bunch off the top. Our weekend and summer plans, also, were sacrosanct. We saw a new movie in theatres on opening weekend every week for about thirteen years (until my year in Alberta; by the time I’d returned, she was working part-time).

I doubt very much that I have marketable skills, having painted myself into a particular corner. I suppose, in certain ways, this pushes me, also.

There were the dark stretches, where I could barely afford to feed myself, and certainly couldn’t afford to socialize, forcing a particular kind of isolation upon myself for the choice of writing. I couldn’t simply go out for drinks with a friend, go to the movies, or go out to dinner. Those simply weren’t options.

Part of what did fuel during these stretches were my other activities: I co-ran The TREE Reading Series, for example, from June 1994 through to the end of 1998; I co-founded the ottawa small press book fair in 1994, which I’ve run twice a year since. I started what became The Factory Reading Series back in 1992. I started producing wee chapbooks as above/ground press during the summer of 1993. I wrote book reviews for The Ottawa X-Press from mid-1994 until the end of 1998, a weekly column that slowly became every two, three and then four weeks (that’s when I finally quit). Part of what kept me going at the paper was hearing from writers such as Martha Baillie that I was the only person to review her first novel (I found out later that I was the only one who reviewed her first novel positively; her publisher wasn’t forwarding the other reviews). I was the first and often only reviewer for dozens of books; how could I quit, even though they were so blatantly attempting to get rid of me? (I only achieved the column because no one else would do it for what little they were paying.) It made me very aware of the importance in what I was attempting to do, and how desperately hard it was to put books out into the world, all before I even managed to produce my own first collection (which I don’t think was reviewed at all). Honestly: if we don’t discuss what has already been published, why bother producing more?

I’m not entirely sure how I arrived. In my later teens, I met Henry Beissel and Gary Geddes, two poets and Concordia University profs who were local to where I grew up, both of whom allowed me some kind of external verification that writing was something worth pursuing. By my early to mid-twenties, in Ottawa, I was in contact with poets such as Michael Dennis, Joe Blades, Judith Fitzgerald, John Newlove, George Bowering and Ken Norris, all of whom were supportive in a variety of ways. This was worth doing. I mean, Milton Acorn sold his tools and picked up poetry and managed to make a go of it, so why couldn’t I?

In the later 1990s, I founded The Peter F. Yacht Club as a support group; I saw a number of people around me that felt a bit isolated in what they were doing, so thought the best way to counteract that was to get a bunch of us together, even if for nothing else than conversation. I mean, it’s a strange thing to write poems or little stories and send them to magazines, attempt writing grants and chapbook/book publication, and all of that, if you’re on the outside of it. Partners might not understand, friends might not understand, etcetera, so I got a small group of us together—Stephen Brockwell, jwcurry, Laurie Fuhr, Anita Dolman, Clare Latremouille, etcetera—for the sake of an informal social/writing group. To feel less isolated in these weird things that we do. When you feel on the outside, you simply start your own group, right? I would like to think it helped more than a couple of us.

There’s a certain pragmatism I think I’ve developed over the years (uncertain whether it was already there, and I expanded, or if I made a conscious or unconscious choice around such early on): I don’t see the purpose to dwelling upon what I’ve set aside or ‘lost’ for the sake of certain choices I’ve made around writing. That can only lead to dark places. I’d rather focus on what I’ve achieved: I mean, I’ve been able to do ridiculous things thanks to my writing life, whether watching one of the Royal Weddings in a hotel room in Kelowna, British Columbia with Bill Richardson (delightful, and rather surreal), visiting Molly’s Reach in Sechelt, able to train multiple times across the prairies, touring with Anne Stone and kath macLean, or the multiple reading tours I’ve done with Stephen Brockwell around Ireland, Canada and the United States; or watch the sun rise from a rooftop in Vancouver with Tom Snyders, Clare Latremouille and Gerry Gilbert after a full night of drinks and conversation. I’ve had remarkable, ridiculous fortune and adventures thanks to writing, and very deliberately use those experiences to help me ride through the more fallow periods. And really: you can’t choose left and then decide to focus on being angry for not choosing right.

I’ve also been incredibly fortunate to have a number of generous people around me, who have helped in real, tangible ways when I required such. It took a long time to be able to accept such assistance at all, and learn to deflect the natural impulse toward shame and embarrassment: I should be able to look after myself. Michael Dennis told me years ago that it was a choice I had to make: I either had to find my own money, or be okay with others offering money when I required. I couldn’t simply do neither and expect to keep going. I do a lot of work for others, so if someone wishes to assist me as well, I should let them. So there. I spent a lot of my twenties feeling ashamed for these bits of assistance. I don’t want your free money: I want to sell books.

I’ve had, and still do have, real stretches of what’s the fucking point? My most recent poetry collection didn’t receive a single review, and only six people showed up when I launched the prior (the publisher, who lives locally, didn’t even attend). I’ve probably had a combined sixty-plus book rejections over the past six years, and, despite having some dozen poetry, fiction and non-fiction book-length manuscripts out in the world (some for more than a few years), I haven’t a damned thing forthcoming. There are some publishers I used to deal with regularly that I can barely get to return an email. I sometimes worry that, as much as I’ve accomplished as an editor/curator, some of that has actually obscured much of my own literary output. I occasionally wonder: maybe I’m not a very good writer, but was taken on for some of the hustling I’ve been able to do. As much as it has fed me enormously as far as enthusiasm, energy and influence, I suspect I’m much more appreciated for some of the editorial/curatorial work than my own writing. And yet, I know that some of it is as good as anything else out there (I also know that my best work is still ahead of me). I think I’ve been fortunate, in certain ways, to have a good sense of the “long game.” My time will come. If literature has taught me nothing else, it has taught me to be patient. It’s an element of why I work so hard to support and encourage as many as I do; it honestly takes so little to assist most people in their writing, and the results can be breathtaking.

Honestly, I think fear prompts a percentage of what drives me, whether I want to admit it or not (fortunately, enthusiasm is still the strongest motivator). I started a new magazine after Rose was born, for example, the quarterly Touch the Donkey; it took a few months to realize that I was terrified of being forgotten once I was less in a position to be able to leave the house for a few years. What am I so afraid of? There is already apathy; there can’t be “more” apathy. It is literature, after all.

Fear: I’m the eldest of two, both of whom grew up with a mother who had extended illness. From 1967 onwards (the year they were married), she was gravely ill for forty-three years (she died in 2010). She lived through twenty-two years of kidney dialysis, and had a five percent chance of surviving either of the first two attempts at kidney transplants (circa 1981 and 1983; she nearly bled out during one; the experience pulled her back from attempting a third until 2000, which actually worked; she wanted to see her children grow up, she said). She had multiple hernias, including a few double and at least one triple. During her final decade, she had pneumonia quarterly: we didn’t take it seriously until she was in hospital for more than four or five weeks. There were the years of absolute anger and lashing out, most of which occurred throughout the 1980s and into the 90s. And by the time she finally went, the dementia was encroaching, which was its own series of issues that required constant attention and sorting.

I was born in 1970, and my sister, 1976 (we’re both adopted), and from 1974 onwards, she was more in hospital than home, with the worst of it being through the length and breadth of the 1980s; and when she was home, she required quiet, and a particular level of care. I was a caregiver from very early on, running household, laundry and interference, walking on eggshells around her many mood swings. Imagine: when I was around ten or so, she went into hospital on New Year’s Day, and we got her back in October. Those were very long stretches. My sister would be shuffled off to neighbour, grandmother, what have you, and my silent father would be out in the yard, doing farmwork. I learned rather early on to manage certain things on my own, and accept a particular kind of isolation (none of her health issues or updates were ever discussed in our household). In hindsight, I think the experience also prompted a kind of terror, that I had to do certain things now and not wait, not knowing how much time I might have, or be allowed, that directly relates to my writing life. I do as much work as possible, not knowing. How much time might I have? Stories of government workers who plan to wait until retirement to start enjoying a particular kind of experience fill me with horror, knowing full well that some simply don’t live long enough. Why not enjoy some of that now?

And: having given up a particular kind of stability for the sake of my writing, if I’m not regularly producing, then what was the point?

Resistance: An Anthology of Poetry, edited by Nyla Matuk

ONE WAY TO KEEP TRACK OF WHO IS TALKING

If I change one word, I change history. What did I

say today? Do I even remember one word? Writing is

oral tradition. You have to practive the word on

someone before writing it down.

I do not intend to become the world’s greatest Indian

orator. Maybe I might by accident. I might speak my

mind even when running off my mouth like I’m doing.

language finds a tongue. Maybe it will be an Indian

accent.

Counting hostile Indians is made easier because they

don’t talk much or very little. They look the part

—the part in the middle with braids. You never do

know if you are talking to an Indian.

Frozen Indians and frozen conversations predominate.

We mourn the ones at Wounded Knee. Our traditions

buried in one grave. Our frozen circles of silence

do no honour to them. We talk to keep our

conversations from getting too dead. (Marie Annharte Baker)

I was curious to see this new anthology edited by Montreal poet Nyla Matuk, Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2019), a volume of work including contributions by Jordan Abel, Marie Annharte Baker, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Beth Cuthand, Rosanna Deerchild, Marilyn Dumont, Marvin Frances, Louise Bernice Halfe-Sky Dancer, Lee Maracle, Janet Rogers, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Gregory A. Scofield, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, James Arthur, Wayde Compton, Jim Johnstone, El Jones, Christine Leclerc, Canisia Lubrin, Sachiko Murakami, Arleen Paré, Michael Prior, Shane Rhodes, Ingrid Ruthig, Karen Solie, Moez Surani, Derek Webster and Rita Wong. For the purposes of this book, “resistance” seems concurrently an overly general and remarkably precise descriptor, one that acknowledges a building cultural shift over the past decade or so, and the responses to those shifts, as well as to some of those authors who have been already been doing this kind of work for some time. There has been a growing frustration around cultural issues, with subjects such as Idle No More and #MeToo cohering into flourishing movements, something that has been increasingly reflected in Canadian writing and publishing. Young writers such as Billy-Ray Belcourt and Jordan Abel might only have emerged over the past decade or so, but poets such as Armand Garnet Ruffo, Rita Wong and Marie Annharte Baker have been at the forefront of this kind of work for a very long time, so while some of the larger attentions to such issues and ideas might be more recent, the responses to such have existed for decades.

As Matuk writes as part of her introduction: “The poems in this book question the triumphalist, nation-building narratives typical of Canada’s historiography. As a settler-colony, Canada will only find the road to moral ground once it attempts to understand how and why it sits atop land, cultures, significant landmarks, and memories that do not belong to it, and faces its history of irreversible damage to First Nations Peoples, including its genocidal intent; once the state stops taking for granted that its self-declared presence permits access to unceded lands or entitles it to ignore or transgress the territorial or jurisdictional sovereignty of First Nations.” As she writes:

            But colonialism isn’t merely a historic phenomenon we can dismiss as irreversible. It’s an ongoing set of practices negatively affecting human beings and the environment. The poems in this anthology believe that these practices can be confronted. Such decolonization requires art form that re-orient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized. Or at least they may offer a gambit in that direction. The point, to borrow a phrase from feminist political theorist bell hooks, is to move the locus of colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to centre. As writer and activist M. NourbeSe Philip tells us, “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness.”

Writing as a response to politics, I would argue, is a thoroughly postmodern idea: writing that exists as part of the world (and a response to that world) as opposed to the modernist suggestion that writing exists separate from the world. We exist in tandem, and one can’t exist without affecting the other. Why should writing be any different? And some of the strongest writing I’ve seen over the past decade or more has been work that exists within the world, from the geopolitical to the social to the flourishing of eco-poetry.

Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry opens with a land acknowledgment (something I’ve been hearing, increasingly, at literary events the past few years, but hadn’t seen in print), and ends with a variety of statements by a handful of the poets, providing context for them and their works. As Vancouver poet Rita Wong’s statement (clearly composed before her jail time) writes:

In August 2018, while BC was in a state of emergency because of wildfires, breaking records for the second year in a row, I sang and sat in ceremony in front of Kinder Morgan’s Westridge marine terminal for half an hour. For this, I was arrested, and face the threat of 28 days in jail for opposing the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. My punishment—while Kinder Morgan gets away with clearcutting trees, poisoning the land, air, and water—shows how Canadian laws are dangerously disconnected from the laws of physics, chemistry, and the land itself.

            Where Canadian law is failing to protect us from increasing the likelihood of climate disasters, thankfully we can and are learning from natural law and Indigenous law that we have a reciprocal relationship with the land. We all have a responsibility to care for the land’s health, which is ultimately our health too.

            15,000 scientists have issued a warning letter that we need to make a fast transition to renewable energy. Governments aren’t responding fast enough to the peril that we face due to climate destabilization. On a geological scale, we are in imminent peril now.

            I am just one of over 200 people who have been arrested because we take climate crisis seriously. We cannot afford to let this black snake pipeline acidify the ocean. We stand in solidarity with the land, the water, the earth, and all the relatives protecting our collective future.

This does feel like an important book, furthering a conversation that has been building for quite some time. And what should I, as a straight, male and white writer be doing in my own work? Listening, certainly. Paying better attention to some of these conversations that might make certain people uncomfortable (and rightly so). Sometimes it is better not to speak, but, instead, to help re-broadcast the thoughts and works of another, from conversations around Omar Khadr, poverty, systematic racism, the Kinder Morgan pipeline, unceded territories and a history of genocide against Indigenous people and communities, colonialism, Canada’s history of slavery and the historic erasure of Black neighbourhoods from Vancouver to Halifax, Japanese internment camps, the list of murdered or missing Indigenous women and girls, and the trauma surrounding the Residential Schools system. We can only move forward (whatever that forward might look like) once these conversations and reconciliations are properly addressed, otherwise we are trapped where we stand.

BOUNDARIES

This is dream city, built on shores

still not ceded. This is a city of tourists

with mouths agape, these are my boundaries:

the islands in the Gulf, the sea they might call Salish,

the land taken there, taken again

from another family, that line nearly faltered.

and now a nephew with my father’s grin, the last one.

Between the people and the land, what have I to teach?

to tolerate suburbs? To let the land be covered

with another’s vision, then stretch our line out farther than the

commuter trains,

stop where the valley’s silt turns hills, the residents nearly Albertans.

The time is now, and now, and now; built so fast with minds

less changed, from Expo to Olympics,

a lifetime. More than his. Most of mine. (Sachiko Murakami)

I’ve heard recently (given the combination of federal election and thanksgiving weekend) that politics is something our parents should have taught us not to avoid, but to discuss and inquire about in a respectful, thoughtful manner, far different than a generation or two prior, where politics at the dinner table might have been considered taboo. One hopes that a collection such as this would be taught in schools, both for the writing and the content, to showcase just how much culture is shifting and has already shifted to acknowledge some of these conversations, frustrations and attempts toward reconciliation. Given the volume includes numerous works reprinted from full-length collections, I would suspect that is one of the purposes here. The world is changing. Writing is changing in response. One hopes that enough might be listening.