On Writing #118 : Elee Kraljii Gardiner

Essay on Inclusivity

Elee Kraljii Gardiner

My literary community in Vancouver seems to rotate around and on social media – or maybe that’s just my epicentre. It’s a question worth asking myself beyond lamenting writing time lost to gif giggles and memes. In truth, social media has enabled me to do far more writing and creating with other artists than I would have managed without the internet and it has given me an easy channel to connect with writers and editors with whom I can exchange thoughts and eventually, poems.

Social media is where the bulk of calls for submissions I know about are shared and spread. It’s easy to retweet a call from a literary journal – publications (every one of them underfunded and understaffed compared to the amount of labour they face) work hard to reach readers. But their submissions may be sampling only one end of the pool of writers. Who is not part of the conversation?

We know lack of access to technology isolates people, but how is it skewing our literary community? Especially in Vancouver, one of the cruelest cities in Canada for income inequity and unaffordable housing?

Editors, presses and publishers might expand their ring of writers and dilate the experience of the literary community by considering e-privilege. Where are most submissions coming from? Are they weighted towards a certain population? Why? Who aren’t they seeing in submissions?

In September 2016 I participated in a panel on inclusivity in publishing with three smart and active writers who are pushing against racialized and genderized borders in publishing. [1] Jónína and Chelene and Jen made the panel accessible, permeable and conversant using their multi-layered experiences as writers and editors as reference points. I spoke about a slant form of exclusion: how reliable access to computers and sufficient Wi-Fi is a barrier to many of the most committed writers I know.

Most Thursdays since 2008 I’ve spent the afternoon writing with Thursdays Writing Collective,[2] a non-profit writing group for residents of the Downtown Eastside. Many of my cohort can’t count on steady, private, convenient computer availability. I don’t have to leave my house to find wifi or mitigate restricted time slots for public computer use. I have my own computer and when my laptop crashes I can take it to the repair shop and get it back in a day but that’s because I have a credit card, transportation to and from, the mental bandwidth to deal with the frustration of computer problems. I can more or less drop everything - besides my kids - to prioritize my computer.

If a writer living in an SRO (https://dtescollaborative.org) can acquire a laptop they may not have the time, connections or quiet they need to figure out saving and backing up, a confounding experience for me even when I am rested, fed, focused and undisturbed. If belongings or housing aren’t secure, the writing isn’t either. Theft and damage of laptops or jump drives means losing novels, submission records, bios, author photos, literary CVs, manuscripts, editing conversations, journals – imagine all of that hitting you at once. Imagine it happening repeatedly. These practical difficulties in the writing life are a colander, straining the breadth and depth of voices from a fuller literary community. Award-winning poet Henry Doyle (https://vimeo.com/178824020), who periodically struggles with Wi-Fi issues told me on the phone, “It’s really hard to be out of the loop. I don’t know what’s going on or how to get in touch with people. I feel like I’m missing a lot.”

When John Asfour and I coedited V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012) our mandate was to create an holistic picture of the neighbourhood by yoking published and unpublished authors in one cross-genre anthology. We had to figure out alternative ways to connect and communicate beyond and outside of the pool we knew how to reach. How do you reach people you don’t know how to reach? We tried our best by asking everyone we could for suggestions.

For starters, we accepted handwritten submissions. We established a box at the library to accept texts so people didn’t have to pay postage to submit their handwritten texts. We sent a submission call out on radio repeatedly. We passed out handbills, published notices in newsletters, handed out posters and asked people to use word of mouth to spread the call. We contacted outreach workers, mentors, volunteers and asked them to share the info. I posted and handed out my cell number so writers could ask me questions or arrange to submit their pieces.

We used social media to target organizers and activists who could print out the call and share it face to face with people who might be interested. We did a good job but there are undoubtedly many venues of contact that never occurred to us.

Other ways to bridge the digital divide are common sense, and contagious. After writing long hand in class, it’s a frequent occurrence for some TWC writers type up writing for the people who don’t have computer access. This need has at times been so crushing that Thursdays Editing Collective, part of TWC, has held “type-up” sessions after class where we quickly convert handwritten texts into digital forms that are easier to edit and preserve.

A few years ago WORD Festival (which also programmed the 2016 inclusivity panel) asked what kind of event was most needed in the Downtown Eastside. Since then they have held free public Type Up events at Carnegie Community Centre where people can bring ten pages of writing - short stories, poems, letters or legal documents - to be typed on the spot, lightly spellchecked and turned into a doc/cd/printout for free.

When we connect with a writer who is offline some or all of the time we can ask what the challenges are, what they need, what would make things smoother. Maybe they need help getting their work to one of the journals that only accepts through the online site Submittable. Maybe we ask our own publishers and editors what they need in order to hear from people outside the standard stable of frequents.

Other hacks around e-exclusion abound, and we’d do well to share the info with each other to make a more robust community. We need to hear from the creators who aren’t at the epicenter of the update matrix.

After the panel on inclusivity an audience member, Jessica Key, contacted me on Twitter to ask more questions. She wrote a paper for her MPub class you can read here: https://eleekg.com/2016/10/17/how-can-publishers-be-more-inclusive/

It’s not lost on me Jessica and I were able to do this thanks to social media but like any other privilege, e-privilege can help dismantle itself.

---

[1] Sep 25, 2016 at the WORD Festival in Vancouver programmed by Natasha Sanders-Kay for Magazines BC. My co-panellists were Jónína Kirton and Chelene Knight and the panel was mc’d by Jen Sookfong Lee. http://www.magsbc.com/magsbc-presents-inclusiveness-panel-word-vancouver

[2] I started Thursdays Writing Collective in 2008 and passed the directorship in September 2016 to Amber Dawn. www.thursdayswritngcollective.ca

Elee Kraljii Gardiner [photo credit: Christoph Prevost] is the author of the book of poems serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016), which is going into a second edition. She is the co-editor with John Asfour of V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012), which was shortlisted for the 2012 City of Vancouver Book Award. Elee founded Thursdays Writing Collective, a non-profit organization of more than 150 writers in Vancouver and she is the editor and published of its eight anthologies. Her efforts to foster writers earned the 2015 Pandora’s Collective BC Writer Mentor Award. She is originally from Boston and is a dual US/Canadian citizen. [Ed. note: Today is also her birthday. Happy Birthday, Elee!] www.eleekg.com

On Writing #117 : Rusty Morrison

Writing Nonetheless, Nonetheless Writing

Rusty Morrison

(one)

There are the moments when something is amassing, pressing from all sides, holding me still, and, at the same time, provoking me to act, some impulse that I have not understood how to enact. What amasses isn’t heat, but is heat’s kin in its ability to penetrate, to permeate, to make the climate of the interior porous to what is changing around it. Something has happened, is happening still, that I am in the midst of and somehow missing, and that I have, myself, become missing within.

I may not be its center, and I am de-centered in the experience, in the not-understanding what it is. The “something” opportunes a knowing that brings on a stillness in me (“still” as in the sense of not moving on, but also “still” in the sense of realizing I’m still what I was, not able to engage whatever is amassing). Stillness is only the first order of attention; motion is needed, be it motion in mind, in hands, in words—it might be any of these or other to them, but the provocation must be understood soon enough or the sensation diminishes before I am fully able (willing?) to be conscious of it. So much in such moments might be lost.

Yet, it’s that pause, that stillness, which allows for initiation of a speeded-up, almost involuntary second order of attention—my hand begins writing a note, phrase, pause of words, in the notebook I carry with me.

Sometimes that odd scatter of words in my notebook will hold some glimmer of a clairvoyance in it, which I’ll feel when I open to those words again, later, or the next morning, and write from them. “Clairvoyance,” from the French clair ‘clear’ + voir ‘to see.’ But I hear “voyage” in “-voyance,” and I hear “voice” in “voir.” So I offer them, too.

During my return to that scatter of words, I sometimes feel guilt about the fact that the entry in my notebook was necessitated by an amassing I’d not been able to understand, that I’d missed. But if I bring that guilt forward, and face it cleanly, then it shifts. Such instances are opportunities in which  I might begin to navigate a new trajectory toward a kind of becoming that is more than my current fixity of framing allows.

This morning, once I’ve walked back into the house, after dumping the kitchen garbage, after making too much noise, after taking up too much space in the outside without sensing first what that predawn dark might hold—I realize I’ve missed whatever this particular morning’s pre-morning dark was. “No different than any other morning,” I rationalize. There’s nothing new out there. I get up at this time nearly every day, and my routine often takes me outside briefly. But today something in the sound of the front door’s lock locking is different—an inexplicable difference, which rests uneasily under the generic sensation-category of loss.

Some of the orders of attention that I find in the act of writing are close kin to the order of attention that prompts me to unlock the door and go back to stand outside—which may result in finding nothing, except to feel what “nothing” amasses nonetheless.

(two)

I’m interested in the orders of attention that I don’t necessarily recognize—the orders of attention that sometimes are slipped between more recognizable orders of attention, or are preceding them, or are happening concomitantly, as waking dreams I didn’t quite notice soon enough. I think of these orders as the times when I am “writing nonetheless.”

I appreciate that word “nonetheless” as it begins with the null of “none,” (which can suggest the connotation: “no one”). But the extra “o,” which would create “no one,” is hidden under the “n” ’s visor—I call it “visor” since it’s not a large enough overhang to call it an umbrella, it’s not a complete obscuring. Next comes “the,” or “the less” which suggests that the “less” here is specific (“this less” is being pointed to; it’s not “any less,” not “a less”). Common reading of the whole would suggest that “nonetheless” is proposing an equivalence. In other words: something “is the case nonetheless,” or is the case regardless. But I can also hear in it a naming of the “none,” as in “let me introduce you to “none,” from the family of “theless.” As in: “Here’s None the Less.” Or “Here’s Atilla the Hun.

I realize that I’ve digressed in that last paragraph—playfully, absurdly, “none”-sensically…

How will I know how far to let myself digress when I’m working to open an idea in my mind, in my writing, in my poem’s line? I suppose that, for me, I need to keep checking to see if I’m still having a physical experience of something amassing, some heat—a sensory component. I can admit to myself that in the above paragraph, as I typed “Atilla,” I felt I’d lost some heat, lost my sensory component. It was, for me, time to stop. To breathe.

I often remind myself of what Henri Bergson recounts: it is useful to attend to the body’s forms of sensate awareness. His example is that we often laugh before we realize why we are laughing, before we’ve parsed out an intellectual explanation: the mind comes in afterward to explain our physical response. I take this to suggest to me that it is useful to feel the laugh, to feel the sensate awareness—how often do I ignore it? Do I fail to take the time to ask my intuition to engage with it? How often such opportunities are lost.

For me, when I’m working in the nonetheless, there’s a sensory component that rises, that comes on, as involuntarily as a laugh. As I noted when I began this writing—it might be a kind of pressure, a heat. It might be a feeling in my throat, or a very subtle shiver that I feel in my chest, or at the back of my neck. For how long will the sensory remain animate? For how long should I keep fitting words to something that I can’t understand, that may even seem counter to what I typically might write, to what I expected? These are questions that sit outside of the experience, and that overly logical generalizations can’t necessarily answer. To approach this too logically, with too much explanation, is to sheath the experience in intellect’s veils. Veils can be lovely, can be nearly sheer—in that electric-translucent shimmer, which very fine, very thin fabric yields—can animate further what emanates, can help me to see the shapes, the contours of a meaning within the veils. It can be a useful thing, to use language in this way, for a while. But, at some point, what’s there may be entirely obscured. Then it’s time to track back, or to begin again, after a pause. Maybe it’s time to step outside, into the late morning. Or, it’s already late, and I should be leaving for work! 

Michel Serres notes “every form is draped in an infinity of adherences.” To sense and then to suffuse the sensory with language, and language with the sensory—this is an act that I might experience as an undraping of a form, even if the form, by its nature, continues to move within the infinity of its adherences, beyond the reach of my act of finding, since no poem, or piece of writing, will conclude its finding out. But, what I take from Serres is more: I must stay alert in my sensate being, since the act of writing may begin to obscure what I was seeking, may begin to occlude the act of finding with only more adherences. Such are the lively paradoxes; such are the risks.

Rusty Morrison’s Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta) was a finalist for the NCIBA and also for the NCBA Awards in Poetry. After Urgency (Tupelo) won The Dorset Prize. the true keeps calm biding its story (Ahsahta) won the Sawtooth Prize, the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, & the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America.  Whethering (The Center for Literary Publishing), won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Book of the Given was published by Noemi Press. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Awards from PSA. Her poems &/or essays have appeared in Boston Review, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Pen Poetry Series, Prelude, VOLT, and elsewhere. Her poems have been anthologized in the Norton Postmodern American Poetry 2nd Edition, The Arcadia Project: Postmodern Pastoral, Beauty is a Verb, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare and elsewhere. She has been co-publisher of Omnidawn (www.omnidawn.com) since 2001. She has taught in MFA programs, been a visiting poet at colleges, and teaches workshops through Omnidawn and elsewhere. Her website: www.rustymorrison.com

On Writing #116 : Laressa Dickey

On Writing

Laressa Dickey

I.

Writing as a way toward innerness, an organ of innerness.

I am not just trying to be a human being.

What are we meant for?

As in, a body walks into the world.

We are transmitting, performing, a mouthed thing into the world.

Is there humor in this story?

I know what to do in my innerness.

Language is the presence of watching and being watched.

A voice walks into a room.

The speaker is leaning heavily on their left leg and this can be heard through the folds of the vocal cords.

There was a moment when the container led to content.

Or reader, in your terms, there was a moment when the form made the content.

But first, there was motion.

There was inside and outside.

Then came up and down.

All this because of a midline, then multiple points of resistance.

There are joints between the bodies.

The speaker on their left leg and the hearers now.

I saw the back of his body disappear through the door down a long hall, his left shoulder drooping.

The hallway a dark panelling, fashionable in the late 70s, somebody got a good deal on that.

I felt as if they were connected, the man walking away, left shoulder drooping, and the sadness as I remembered him lacing up his shoes in the morning before he left to go to work.

He was a young man then.

He was a young man thinking of this list: get gas in the car, pump up the tires, punch in, start the computer, sell sell sell, repeat repeat.

Before there are too many of you, standing with hands in pockets, let me say

My lavender is dead, has died.

It was his garden before it was mine.

To affect the future of the yet unborn.

That’s what’s for breakfast, friends.

II.

What is the poem? Is it having all the parts, being published, overt, checking the list? What about my friend whose life is consumed by caring for her small children? Or the one who cares for their dying parent? What about those? Are they the poem? Is life the poem? The transformation and breath of sap moving up and down, x times a day, feeding itself? The world is so loud you can barely hear it, the poem. Why do we keep on? In my partner’s native language (Farsi), there’s a phrase I love, which roughly translates, sometimes you ride the saddle, sometimes the saddle rides you. It’s like this with poems, maybe one kind of rhythm. It’s coming to you, you’re ready for it; you miss each other traveling in opposite directions.

III.

Crippled by that adage, write if you have something to say.

What?

No one talks only if they have something to say.

If only!

What about not saying what you have to say?

Say nothing.

Is that the poem?

Or saying something inside of saying nothing?

Writing as a space keeper; silent space; missed chances.

Writing as a failure to be in the made world with its noise.

Laressa Dickey [photo credit: Lily Kiara] is a writer based in Berlin. She's the author of several chapbooks including A Piece of Information About His Invisibility and apparatus for manufacturing sunset, and the poetry collection Bottomland (Shearsman). Two books are forthcoming: Roam (Shearsman) in 2016, and Twang (Backwaters Press) in 2017.

Recent reads: "Vesper Vigil" by Bronwen Tate

Vesper Vigil by Bronwen Tate
Published by above/ground press, 2016.

"You sleep, I sigh, we mingle breath like lovers –
I reach a stealthy hand, adjust the sheet.
Somewhere between sentiment and complaint
are words to name the child sleeping here"


So begins Vesper Vigil, a collection of sonnets which chronicle the last weeks of Bronwen Tate’s pregnancy with this perfectly succinct ambiguity – how it feels to be pinned down by what we love most. True to her intent, Tate records both the daily parenting of her young son and the approaching birth of her daughter without getting precious or irate. Instead, she employs a tenderness that seesaws between love and pain, gentle yet sore to touch.


“Will this lumpy baby ever come out?”
Owen considers, replies “I don’t know”.
So we measure days in peaches, bruises,
bruised peaches, it’s the body that chooses."


Tate explores the fragile limits of our bodies – how we feed, grow and injure them – within the framework of domesticated routines that gauge her excruciating wait. Every seemingly casual digression probes one of two spectres, the impending pain or joy. They’re a package deal, of course, and her bittersweet tone acknowledges it. Like the development of a fetus, these sonnets mature in nerves that feel deeply rooted thanks to the sing-song rhyme scheme. Each page can encapsulate hours or weeks. Her choice of form allows that compression rate without sacrificing a fluid rhythm, though – as is common with the sonnet – rhymes occasionally raise an eyebrow. (Did she really play disco, or does it just rhyme with San Francisco, etc.?) In any case, by the time she’s admitted to her hospital room, the anxiety and loneliness of third-trimester pregnancy is palpable:


"I’ve taken Misoprostol, Cervidil,
now sitting, watch contraction numbers rise,
one hand to hold the heart monitor still,
slight lag between the pain and peaking highs.
We left with early fog but found no bed,
paced corridors and watched the shifting crane,
took Owen to a playground, sat and read,
called only to be postponed again.
At two at last they showed me to my room,
this prison of uncertain duration,
can’t leave these walls till baby quits the womb,
perch on window bench, await dilation.
Alone now, I breathe through pains, try to sleep.
The road to you be gentle, dark, and steep."


Reading the above selection, I realize how little I’ve contemplated the psychological effects of pregnancy and childbirth. (Just analyzing Tate's thought that, once admitted, she cannot leave the hospital without first enduring an unknown pain gives my pulse a race.) As someone who looks in on parenthood from the outside, that’s my biggest takeaway from this chapbook. Tate manages to imbue archetypal family dynamics with a memorable dose of personal details, creating an unguarded glance at motherhood in transition.

On Writing #115 : kevin mcpherson eckhoff

On Writing, its Opposites, and Practical Methods for Embracing the Mawkish Thralldom of the Day-to-Day
kevin mcpherson eckhoff

No.

kevin mcpherson eckhoff loves poetry parties and saying “Me me me, me memememe … mmmmm.” Forge and rhapsodomancy are his fault, as are the final issues of dANDelion magazine and Open Letter, guest edited with his bff, Jake “The” Kennedy. Sorry! BookThug published Merz Structure No. 2 Burnt by Children at Play. Check it! Out! Library-style! When kevin’s not teaching at Okanagan College, he hangs out with a Laurel and two kiddos, sometimes cuddling at the Starlight Drive-in during a full moon in July or dipping into Halfway Hotsprings during a light February snowfall. Oh, and you can catch his face as “Tall Security Guard” in the film Tomato Red.

We Who Are About To Die : Elaine Woo

The two different questions of what constitutes freedom and does adversity build character intrigued Elaine and are examined in her second manuscript.  How much freedom do we really have when the state monitors our emails and phone calls and builds intricate profiles of us?  How do we find freedom despite all that?

Elaine Woo's second poetry collection continues to look through the framework of mythology, as does her first book, Cycling with the Dragon, Nightwood Editions, 2014.

Where are you now?
Good question.  In the early weeks after the US election, my initial impulse was to curl up in a fetal ball and hide in bed to await the end of days.  But after speaking with Canadian friends and relatives residing in America, I decided, more than ever, now is the time to speak out and resist.  And, I have begun through my writing.

I read Trump is stripping funding for NASA climate research when polar glaciers are melting at a rapid pace and the Global Mean Sea Level has risen 4 to 8 inches in the past century.  Perhaps, if he has any beachside holdings, he might reconsider were it to flood.

The CanLit furor has proved just as divisive.  With so many divergent views, bridging  is ever more desirable.  We need calm discussions and perhaps agree to disagree.

What are you reading?
The Errancy (poems) by Jorie Graham.  I'm not very far into the book but hugely admire her craft and depth.

What have you discovered lately?
Firstly, the joy of less.  Secondly, any time is cause for celebration.

The appreciation that all people are imperfect.

Where do you write?
I've been invited to join writing groups as well as to facilitate writing groups but feel most comfortable at my ancient teacher's desk, surrounded by books by authors I admire, student prints, and photos of loved ones.

What are you working on?
A second manuscript about human foibles.  One day while reading an anthology of classical mythology, it struck me to use the Greek gods and the Monkey King of Chinese mythology to represent humans in fictitious exploits.

Have you anything forthcoming?
I have 3 pieces coming out in CWILA's S/tick.  One is a graphic comic:  a conversation about the very real power struggle in many relationships. The other two are poems inspired by firstly, a female duck chastising 3 mallards at a local bird sanctuary and secondly, a night looking at celebrity stories online.

What would you rather be doing?
Nothing else.  I write for the joy of writing.

Birth

                          Blue skies agitate, streak, marble with black and silver

Gaia’s gauze-sheathed breasts fall upon Uranus’, his iron manhood slips in her well.  Geysers erupt, cloud banks curdle.  Hurricane current of DNA, monster strands

unravel, wreaks debris of monolithic creatures, twelve Titans, including Cronus, Rhea, and Iapetos, fifty headed and hundred armed Hecatoncheires and Cyclopes, wailing bricks of pain

                           

                                                                  

                   Pater Familias rams their mutant

                                                       progeny in mother’s yawning

                                a mucosal, veiny pink abyss

                                                                              She, red-raging, turns

    A fiction?  Battered, Titans, Cyclopes, and siblings

                                                               

                                                            confined, wince, cringe

nails breasts, rousingly roar for “MORE”

It Takes Imagination

Unfurling reel:

                                beasts’   eyelids squintered

                                                            

                     unfurl a scale obstinate                          another

                                                                                                    

                                                                                               and another

                                    flame of throat kiln

         firing dialogue between brain and tongue

                                                                     winch hefty boulders

                         ignite language of ochre comfort in toil

                                                  

 “a challenge to suffer bravely”1       

                                                        

                                                            shoulder isolation, multi water pots atop head

       labour heroically

              

                                                         slave against hatred

                                                                                            split anguish gruel

                                

                                                                  faint pink amity horizon perceptible

warms brows earthen

                                       ushers in hushed peace

                     clambering out of captivity, a fantasy still?