t thilleman on jj hastain

I was taken by j/j hastain’s use of ellipses as a means to explore the voice.

Upon first hearing j/j’s voice, I saw the image of an angel. Right in front of my eyes. Part of the reason for this was the way the cadence bit into my hearing. Each phrase was a full-stop, then the fullness of the note, heard.

Over time those phrases built a story out of my own, then put my own aside in favor of a larger canvas on which to display everything within and without. I grew as a writer because I leaned into the ductus, the push and flow of the music, the drag of it, the clarity as well as complicated blare of it, at times. Everything—as if the incoming sound was meant for more than simply an ear.

j/j’s approach to writing in a musical splurge, in a full welling of the voice as instrument, brought me to the image the initial sound of the voice evoked in me. Not the kind of angel that would be pictured in a church, but one that vibrated the fleshy and transubstantial weight of knowledge passed “from above.”

Direction, in space and time, took the world of words back and forth, so that I was riding on a wave of pleasure, at the same time I was aware the thematic apparition of j/j’s poem was part shadow as well as living, breathing human being.

To be both in this world and out of it radiated in my skeleton. Each articulation of muscle to bone crawled up out of the primordial ooze of self, searching barren land for a place to start a civilization from the bottom up. j/j’s cadence and care truly restarted me.

In fact, the sense of “above” and “below” materialized in my work because of j/j’s use of the word “heaven.” Heaven, in hastain’s work Priest/ess, means to call out all the pleasures that we see and cannot see, at work in our many received notions of the poem. Gender is an aspect of hastain’s heaven, and not in any kind of limited way. Instead grounding of many variant genders to give space to the world. This also gave me space.

This was certainly the first call of love toward another, and the adamic use of first sex was also at work in the roots of the tongue coincident to the meaning of j/j’s words. The roots intertwined, the writing emerged, the world changed.

Now, in this love and “shared myopia,” we were both able to tell one another how we felt. The simultaneity of opening to another person, while composing, changed the writing from an academic exercise into a full-on longing to be heard at every change—light to dark and dark into its opposite, color.

Red was the first color imparted to me. Then, by j/j, I was handed the entire rainbow, after each rainstorm.

j/j’s “Unseen Beings,” entities who transliterate the material world and light paths thru its darkness, now come to my vocabulary in an organic discovery of thought long held from me by my very own person.

In other words, the word, freed from my logical brain, has enabled itself within the realization of its message, its own “angelization.”

I use the word angel next to angelization to illustrate a difference embedded in each of us—and in this encounter between j/j and myself. To have gotten far from the self was not so much a bad thing, an alienation, rather it was the full on opportunity for action, the place from which to rightly write, to enact the self anew, to rewrite the writing act.

We transform the world by giving voice to the voiceless. Engaging in this activity, in tandem with my writing guru, j/j hastain has proven to be a lasting and a vigorous, mothering influence.

t thilleman is the author of Three Sea Monsters (Our History of Whose Image) in which journal entries and poetic sequences investigate the legacy of Pound’s redactions to Fenollosa’s original manuscript version of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry; Onönyxa & Therseyn (opening for an extended work, Anatomical Sketches, of which Keystone Standstill is the eighth book); Snailhorn (fragments), a 360 poem cycle utilizing vedic transitions in celestial to allegorical articulation; and a novel Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen. His literary essay/memoir, Blasted Tower, was issued by Shakespeare & Co./Toad Suck in 2013. The Special Body, a second work of literary comment is available from Rain Mountain Press. Aura Lifetime (volume one), a selection of his poetry, is currently available. tt’s pastel drawings and readings are archived at conchwoman.com.

Sylvester Green on Jeanette Winterson

Maybe there is a live wire who enters your classroom on the first day of school, and wordlessly places her books on the teacher’s desk, squaring her back to you and all your friends. Introduces herself — in her left hand, no less — by mirror-writing the “Jabberwocky” poem on the blackboard, suspending a zealous exchange erupting on the floor about body hair and deception.

She was new to the school that year and we were oh-so-jaded adolescents, demanding to be impressed. But before the silence broke in waves across our chatter, we had thought we were the only ones with something to say.

The class went still.

Even teenagers stop to think sometimes.

A few months later, on school Parents Night, mine wandered the hallways, amused by the title of my book report book, Sexing the Cherry. It was my first Jeanette Winterson, on loan from the personal collection of the new teacher, the female phD in a man’s suit. Ours was a Victorian home — we didn’t discuss sex — and in that stage of pubescence, everything was embarrassing. But not Winterson. I remained unfazed by the sex and the cherry in flagrante delicto on the cover of that first book. A slim volume, I carried my copy around with me for months, doodling in its pages until I remembered it was not mine, and went to the bookstore to have it cloned: an offering to my teacher, apology included.

She didn’t seem to mind.

At the time, I was sure the name of the book meant more than I, or my parents, could ever know: what Winterson knew. And anyway, I was permissive about everything when it came to art.

Wanting. Welcoming. Wide.

My parents may not have cultivated open dialogue around the dinner table, but they recognized the value of a good story by any artistic means: music (mainly 60s Québecois), art (Toronto in the 80s), clothing (designers’ last call) and books (biographies of lives lived around the world). And while providing my siblings and me with a colourful backdrop of culture from which to draw inspiration, like a well (unlike what Winterson had – or didn’t), they did not suspect the full effect of this transfer of information on my budding brain. A shy child by nature, I now experienced a bold enthusiasm ripening inside me, fueling the fires of imagination — igniting more than my parents ever had in mind.

To allay the situation, they implemented curfews, monitored phone time, cautioned me against taking things too far.

But it was too late.

Winterson’s work guided me firmly away from our principled suburban existence on this planet, pulling me waaaaay into outer space.

Where, it turns out, I was much more comfortable.

By escaping to other galaxies, I was able to relieve myself of the expectations of my own. As a girl, teenagerhood was extra fucked-up: a turbulent mess of mixed messages and mind games, a come-as-you-are invitation on irresistible stationary, welcoming choas into everyday lives. We were directed to take care of ourselves, but to submit to any boy who turned up. To absorb the emotional work of armies of mothers — with our faces numbed by smiles at all times. To think critically about the system from the comfort of its ranks. Be bold without offending. Look seductive without sex. Make out with our abusers til they stop.

Art gave me an alternate universe I could accept unconditionally. One where the rules were guaranteed to be weird. Where stories might not match up. Where girls weren’t pumped out by machines: alternate versions of their own instincts.

Girls who get very good at hiding things. Even from themselves.

My friends and I spent Saturday nights in one another’s bedrooms whipping ourselves into frenzies to the tune of female-fronted punk bands. Their voices howled from the tiny speakers of ghettoblasters we’d got as birthday presents years before the hormones hit. Our music goddesses were no more princesses than we were, and we reveled in their torn ball gowns, lipstick smears, crooked crowns. Winterson gave me all that and a bag of fleas plus foundlings, funeral parlours, raving mothers — oh, and fruit. She flipped us on our heads so we could see the world actually was upside down. Through her, we saw holes in the patriarchy — and poked them.

In my mind, I became neither male nor female, and I believed I could see beyond the skin wrappers of those around me. On the outside I may have well looked like an adult-in-training; a student arriving to class at the prescripted times, bearing trails of assignments done to deadline. But on the inside, my edges were turning to fuzz.

That’s why Winterson’s realism was one I was finally comfortable with: a magic one.

History, hermeneutics, hermaphrodites. Stories so dense I could live in them for miles. Stories within stories, guileful breaks during time, diamonds plucked from the bases of human spines — Winterson spurred me on to look closer, affirming that nothing was as it seems. To me, each of her sentences was charged with explosives — I spent days dismantling them, decoding their symbols, hiding out in the spaces between lines.

She processed things I couldn’t, went places I didn’t, thought things I wouldn’t. In fact, I would read years later in a neatly packaged précis, the characters in Sexing the Cherry were searching across time and space for self.

In a nutshell, I could relate.

In the end, reality never did burrow into my skin and infect me in the way others thought it should. Instead, like a good girl, I internalized Winterson’s irreverent princesses until they established themselves inside my gut, spewing their turbulent flora into my bloodstream, crusading from within to come out.

But take caution, girls: dual existences can be dangerous, and only in my future would I wake up to the war inside me, finally admitting to myself who won. Decipher the secret messages encrypted in Winterson’s script; fully understand what she’d told me about myself. By that time, the strain between my inner world and my high-functioning mirror image would prove too much. Smack me behind the head, crack me in two, a radical new self spilling out. All over the floor.

Now I find myself playing catch-up in later life, wishing I had heeded my own warnings.

As Winterson says at the outset of The Passion (and I’m paraphrasing here): autobiography doesn’t exist. There is only art. And lies.

As they used to tell me in the classroom: Listen!

Sylvester Green’s fiction and poetry was written by someone else, with another name.

Nicole Brewer on Anakana Schofield and Miriam Toews

When I was young – very young – my parents put me in both baseball and ballet. Little girls’ ballet classes often involve the classic pink tutu, and I hated it, although I’m not sure why. I hated the class, I hated the costume, and I hated pink. I think that may have been the beginning of my rejection of “femininity,” a seed that grew unbeknownst to me until my early twenties, when I finally realized there was an entire tree of internalized misogyny in my heart that I had to start cutting down.

It grew fastest and strongest in high school, when I surrounded myself with male friends (girls are too dramatic), who were more than happy to recommend male-dominated entertainment: so the music, movies, and books I drowned myself in were created by men, about men. This wouldn’t have been a problem in and of itself, but I also started repeating and believing nonsense like “women just don’t write books that interest me,” and “women just don’t really write literary fiction.” I would only read books by women if they were recommended to me by male friends, and even then I would be wary of enjoying them too much: I didn’t want to lose my literary credibility by liking women’s fiction. I wanted to – what is that ridiculous expression? Run with the big boys?

I held onto this mindset all through university, as I started to dream up the kind of writer I wanted to be (hint: David Foster Wallace). All my dream lifestyles were men, and not just men, but manly men: Ernest Hemingway, Eric Blair, Wallace. They shaped my tastes, my dreams, and my writing. And honestly, they shaped me into a person I am still proud of, each of them inspiring me in a different way. But because I had never thought to seek out female literary writers, I held onto this idea that literary writers were masculine -- that I needed to be masculine -- for a long time.

Finally, a year out of university, I discovered feminism and realized I had nurtured this tree of internalized misogyny. There was a lot to unlearn, and it took many months for the unlearning to reach the literary aspects of my personality. I realized I needed to find women who wrote the way I wanted to write. I knew they were out there, and I needed to find them.

And I found Anakana Schofield.

It may sound ridiculous, but Malarky literally changed my life. It was the first book that I’d read that did everything I wanted to do, and it was by a female author! And of course women write literary fiction, and of course women are talented and smart and eloquent, but somehow, this was news to me. Anakana’s Malarky started this fire in my soul that felt like it had been waiting ten years to start burning, and it wanted more: more women, more women, more women.

The next woman was Miriam Toews. As soon as I finished Malarky, I picked up All My Puny Sorrows, and it was everything I thought I wasn’t allowed to want, to aspire to. It was heartfelt, emotional, personal. It was about women and their relationships, with themselves, with each other, with their families. And it was beautiful – it was so fucking beautiful. Together, Miriam Toews and Anakana Schofield woke up this corner of my brain that had been so ashamed of being female, and they showed me it wasn’t just okay: it was powerful to be female.

Several months later I had the immense pleasure of meeting Miriam at a house reading, and this meeting will forever remain etched in my memory as one of the greatest moments of my personal and professional life. I brought my copy of All My Puny Sorrows, unsure if I would actually muster the courage to ask her to sign it. But muster I did (with the relentless enthusiasm and support of my wonderful partner), and as she was signing it I surprised myself by blurting out to her: this book changed my life. And she is so gracious that she asked why, how it had changed my life, so I told her that -- embarrassingly – it was one of the first literary fiction books I’d ever read by a female author, and that she had made me realize I could succeed as a woman, rather than despite that. And she didn’t laugh or scoff or turn away or politely remove herself. No, she told me that she remembered that moment when she was a young writer, the first time she had found herself in a woman’s book instead of a man’s.

I recently had a conversation with my brother about rituals in other cultures that mark the transition to manhood or womanhood – he wondered if some kind of ritual might have helped him find a sense of self, of purpose, of confidence, more easily or earlier in life. It made me think of that moment, reading Malarky and seeing that who I am and who I want to be are not, as I’d previously believed, fundamentally at odds. And how every woman I’ve read since then – Guadalupe Muro, Carellin Brooks, Helen Oyeyemi, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, K.D. Miller, Marianne Apostolides, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and countless others – has traced my transition into independence. It’s part of why I’ve so enjoyed reading the essays on many gendered mothers, and why I find such comfort in all the literary mothers: it feels like every essay I read is another mother gained.

Nicole Brewer is a writer, editor, and publisher from Toronto. In early 2014, she co-founded the organization words(on)pages to support, pay, and publish emerging writers in Canada. Her recent stories can be found in Canthius, untethered, and The Hart House Review. She is passionate about small press culture, emerging writers, boxing, and tea, and can be found online at nicolebrewerwrites.com.

photo of Anakana Schofield by Arabella Campbell

Kim Fahner on Mary Oliver

I came to Mary Oliver in my late thirties. Before that, I had likely read a poem or two back in university, but had not really known her work in any substantial or influential way as a young poet. Then, I took a yoga class and my teacher, Willa, read “Wild Geese” while I was in some oddly fashioned bird-like pose which was causing me mental, spiritual, and physical grief. (It was likely Pigeon Pose, which I both love and hate for a number of reasons.) For a couple of minutes, while she read, I forgot the frustration I felt within the pose, of thinking I was not ‘good enough’ to do yoga, or that I was not slim or lithe enough to manage the physical contortions and fluidity of the various asanas. 

At the time, I was struggling with major depressive disorder, acting as the primary caregiver for my dying mother and weakening father, and also dealing with anti-depressant weight gain. Dark nights of the soul do indeed exist. I came to my mat each week, feet bare and heart sore. Then, one evening, Willa read the first line: “You do not have to be good.” It was like a bell went off somewhere inside me. After a lifetime of confusing duty with love, this line of poetry was a catalyst for change. It nudged me, gave me permission to begin stepping into myself as a woman and as a poet.

I was terribly overweight at the time I first heard the words, so I couldn’t envision even being on friendly terms with my own body, but the lines “You only have to let the soft animal of your body/love what it loves” now make sense to me. In my mid-forties, fit and healthier than I’ve ever been, I have come to a place where I honour, respect, and celebrate that ‘soft animal.’ There’s an amazing thing that happens when you integrate the physical and spiritual, whether body and spirit, or landscape and spirit, or both.  Oliver’s work, in both poetry and prose, continuously weaves that magic.    

In such a small poem, really, Mary Oliver talks about how intimacy works. She speaks of learning to accept yourself, and others, and she tells the reader that there is a connection to be found in the natural landscape of wilderness if we ever happen to feel too solitary. She does not shrink from giving voice to sadness, even inviting the reader to “Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.” There is great vulnerability here, in opening a heart wide enough to share such stories, and doing so is an intimate act of its own accord. That sense of bravery still amazes me every time I read “Wild Geese.” She so bravely makes herself vulnerable in her work, and this inspires me in my own life and work.

Despite the despair that naturally comes as part of life, “the world goes on.”  Beyond our own personal emotional quagmires, “the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain/are moving across the landscape,/over prairies and the deep trees,/the mountains and the rivers.” The landscape offers respite when nothing else will, and, when you are at your darkest place, Oliver invites you to look up, to see that “the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.”  Hope sits within the centre of the poem, asking the reader to imagine what ‘home’ feels like to a lost soul, and then pointing the way there.

The path through darkness and into light is not simple or tidy in either origin or process. “Wild Geese,” for me, is a piece that resonates deeply. Battling with mental health issues in a stigmatized world is alienating and isolating. To come through the other side, to try and find yourself again, is quite a gargantuan task at times. You lose people whom you thought were friends. You learn to discern whom you can trust, and whom you can risk being vulnerable with, and you sometimes avoid intimacy on a variety of levels because it forces you to face demons over and over again, when you least want to do so, and when you are just too tired. “Wild Geese,” though, reminds me that the risk of opening a heart is more than worthwhile in the long run. 

The final lines echo in my heart whenever I read the poem, as Oliver writes: 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

The notion of disconnection is an illusion, Oliver suggests in all of her work, if you walk out into the woods and touch a tree, or if you look up at the sky to see birds winging their way across its spaces. Hers is a poetic sensibility which requires you to breathe deeply, open your heart, go into dark spaces and spelunk around a bit, and then emerge to find a new version of yourself that is ancient, female, organic, visceral, beautiful, strong, and creative. 

Mary Oliver is my poetic mother, and I think of her whenever I hike in the bush around Northern Ontario, or sit by a lake, or look up at the stars at night.  We have never met, but I have met her in her words, on the page and in my heart, and for that I am so very grateful.

      

Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario.  She is the fourth poet laureate of the City of Greater Sudbury, and the first woman to be appointed to the role. Kim has published three volumes of poetry, and her fourth, Some Other Sky, is being published in Fall 2017 by Black Moss Press. She has also had two of her plays, Ghost of a Chance and Sparrows Over Slag, workshopped at the Sudbury Theatre Centre. Kim has just finished her first novel, a historical piece called The Donoghue Girl, which is set in the mining town of Creighton, a town that existed for a time just outside of Sudbury. She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers' Union of Canada, and PEN Canada. Kim blogs at The Republic of Poetry at kimfahner.wordpress.com

Sarah Cook on Anne Sexton

Women, witches, & wellness

My first encounter with Anne Sexton was over a classmate’s shoulder in AP English, a course I took my senior year despite underwhelming SAT scores and a shyness that nearly consumed me. The classmate’s name was Amy. She had thick black hair and a large disorganized shoulder bag; she talked openly about OCD and witchcraft and feminism, though I don’t remember her ever using those specific words; and she read Anne and talked about reading Anne because I don’t think she could imagine two more meaningful uses of her time. From Amy I learned to admire everything about Anne’s writing—coming, as it did, straight from uterus and heart. It only made sense that I too should own a copy of the Collected. Soon, I found myself adoring Anne as if she were some time-traveling step-mother, an embodied place of permission to be openly failing, flailing, sad and upfront about it.

My real mother was a mess, too. But she struggled to pick up or acknowledge her trauma and its aftermath, left trails of it all over the house which I neatly piled up after her, unaware that by trying to hold her pain myself I was perhaps sabotaging our relationship from the start. Anne was also a traumatized mother and Anne also participated in, perpetuated her own cycles of abuse. This is not about sacrificing one woman for another, but rather, how the modeling of self-ownership, of all our messy and unflattering and unlikeable parts, is so fundamental in a young girl’s learning how to take possession of herself before she grows up and starts letting other people do it for her. Such witchy words.

My mother kept self-help books in her own purse, and despite her true need for help, I used to find them and hide them behind the couch when I was very young, afraid of her becoming something else. I can’t explain the impulse, nor the contradiction—how adolescence can be so driven by the desire for change, smashed right up against a brutal instinct that fears certain forms of it.

When I got older and started reading Anne, I recognized small pieces of my own nature in her words, and my desire to be like her and Amy and the other creative women I’d soon discover grew—women who found strength through their unwellness, or at least despite it. I wanted to be strong and I wanted to survive, but at the very least I wanted to make something beautiful regardless of the obstacles of my life; some desires we discover, suddenly, in the first moment of writing them down, but we feel them retroactively imbuing all the years behind us. In the face of my own teenage girlhood in which I’d so far failed at becoming anything at all, I suddenly saw that women could be sad and messy and hurting and struggling and something, I discovered the spectrum of making things public and that there are choices to be made even when your instinct is to disappear. I wanted to make everything public all at once and I wanted the pure ability to control all my pain in the form of keeping it secret. I did and did not accomplish each, and this is how I’ve come to understand writing: a vehicle for doing both and neither, all at the same time; a space that allows for, and is sometimes made by, productive madness, a feverish kind of magic.

My mother is still a mess though I love her, forgive her a little more each day for certain implications. My step-mothers have come and gone—not just Anne, who feels more and more like a peer at this point in my life, not unlike the ranks that Amy once belonged to: colleague, confidant, someone with flaws and failures openly shared and received. It’s true that I also had a real step-mother, and then another, and then another, until I pretended to stop counting. But this isn’t a story about them and this isn’t a story about “real” women, maternal or otherwise. I am grateful to have learned, finally, that some people can move through one’s life and just keep on going, real or not; the good ones, however, come back again and again, in different forms: mother, peer, sister, partner-in-crime, witch. They evolve and mutate right along with you, between and beyond lives, creating new orders of influence and reflection.

A witch is just a woman you can’t easily parse. Anne made it possible for me to imagine life and writing not demarcated by recognizable wellness; to eventually stop folding myself into little paper cartons of intelligibility and instead be a witness to my own sad, powerful history: to claim it as my own: the missing, the coming and going, the reconfiguring of how to mother and to be mothered: myself, others, you. Throw it all in the pot.

Sarah Cook's newest chapbook, Somewhere the / shaking, is newly out from above/ground press. She has more to say, she just needs a minute. Find her at freelancefeminist.com.