Posts Tagged ‘literacy’

jay —– ** from the redux series

Posted: November 29, 2024 in elise moser
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

One of the pleasures of a reading life is how certain pieces stay with us. This is one for me. I adore it for a host of reasons, not least the sly wit, truth wrapped in strained politeness, but also that it reminds me of a process I once went through, trying to say goodbye, using half a note book, each page torn up in turn, before ultimately realizing it came down to a sentence, dropping the key through the letter box, and grabbing a cab to Heathrow. I smile (and cringe a little) at the memory but mostly I love knowing this is how we are, or can be, or have been, women, especially, trying so hard to say, to explain, everything… until we find the courage to say and do the only thing that really matters.

I didn’t remember my Heathrow moment the first time I read this. One of the magicks of re-visiting those pieces that resonate and linger.

♦

 

** ‘Jay’, originally published, June 2017.

Please re-enjoy!

Jay. I hope you don’t mind that I am just putting the keys in this envelope for you instead of meeting you in person. I know I said I would meet you, but I got a ride tonight so I won’t be here tomorrow after all. I know you said you forgave me, and I really really appreciate it, and I hope you know I really really am sorry for the times I let you down. Also the times you thought I let you down that might not have been actually my fault.

Jay. I am really sorry but I am leaving you the keys here instead of meeting you in person, because I met some guys who can give me a ride most of the way, except they are leaving tonight after their gig (they are a band) so unfortunately I won’t be here tomorrow when you come get these keys. I know that you were pretty mad at me. I really appreciate that you said you would not be mad if I admitted that I didn’t do the stuff I said I would do, which was not fair to you. That is really great. Like, I know I didn’t do the dishes enough and that pissed you off practically every day. So: I did all the dishes before I left! Even the frying pan!

Jay. I’m really truly sorry I won’t be here tomorrow to meet you, but here are the keys. I don’t have the money for the last two weeks of rent because I have to pay these guys gas money, but I’m sure you can find someone to move in on short notice. You can keep my mattress and the clothes in the closet, there are just a few things I couldn’t squish into my bag, I know they won’t fit you but maybe you could sell them. One is my down jacket, the zipper is broken but it’s still really good. You could give it to whoever moves into my room, as part of the deal. If they aren’t vegan.

Jay. I apologize. For everything. I know I said I would meet you in the morning to give you the keys but I am getting a ride with a band tonight – so much cheaper than the Greyhound, only gas and beer money! So I really have to go tonight! I know that in the past me not taking responsibility for my actions was a really big thing for you but since you said if I apologized (really sincerely apologized) (not by text message) you could totally forgive me, I really wanted to be here to meet you and apologize face to face but I have to take this ride. So I hope you don’t mind if I apologize in this note. (This is not a text.) And also I washed the dishes before I left. (I know me not washing the dishes was a thing too.)

Jay. Here are the keys. I’m sorry I won’t be here when we said we would meet, but I have to go. I just have to say I know you were sometimes mad at me but I am basically a good person and it wasn’t my fault that you thought that when we slept together it meant more than it did. I did the dishes. You left a plate and a cup on the counter and I washed them, and the frying pan. (It wasn’t totally fair to say I never did the dishes.) I left you my mattress, I paid $100 for that a year ago on Kijiji so let’s just say that’s $100 of what I owed you for the last two weeks of the month. So if you get someone to move in immediately, you will actually be $100 ahead. Or anyway you’ll have an extra mattress.

Jay. I feel like no matter what I do, it’s not going to make you happy. I know I said I would meet you tomorrow to hand over the keys but I really feel you are going to be mad at me even though you said you would forgive me if I could truly sincerely apologize and take responsibility for my actions, but I think you will actually be happier if I just leave. So with that in mind I have found a ride for tonight so I can’t meet you in the morning, so I am just leaving the keys for you instead. I wish I never slept with you that time because I feel like no matter how many dishes I might have washed or how many times I took out the garbage you would still be mad at me because I’m sorry but I just don’t like you that way, we were both drunk and it was meaningless. I can’t help how I feel, right?

Jay. No matter what I say you will always be mad at me so I’m not going to say anything at all. I am just leaving you the keys.

Jay.

♦

Elise Moser has published short stories; a novel, Because I Have Loved and Hidden It (2009); a YA novel, Lily and Taylor (2013); and a nonfiction book for kids, What Milly Did (2016), which tells the amazing true story of the woman who invented plastics recycling — so the Litter-I-See Project is right up her (litter-strewn) alley! She is a co-organizer of the National Juries and Awards Working Group..

♦♦♦

 

Biggest Litter Peeve:

Moser:— oh, how to choose just one? I don’t know whether this counts as litter, but if it does: when people throw their still-burning cigarettes on the sidewalk, where anyone, including dogs, might step on it. Cigarette butts, which are made of plastic and take years to decompose, are a related one — people don’t seem to even consider those litter, but they are,

xtra care —– ** from the redux series

Posted: November 18, 2024 in kristen den hartog
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

From a picture of an empty gum wrapper, comes ‘xtra care’, the story of a piece of gum tossed into a garbage can on the street, landing on the rim, and being taken, eventually, by a starling to great enough heights to see the beauty of the land before being dropped again on the pavement and being forever changed.

I love the fairy tale quality of this, which reminds me of a series of exquisite chapbooks (The Oldest Cowbird, and The Apple Lovers among them) den Hartog put out in 2023, in the genre she calls Beatrix Potter for grownups. Tiny powerful stories wrapped in a kind of simplicity that sneaks up and astonishes.

Tell me you’ll ever look at gum the same way again.

♦

This is why I continue to run the project. I am honest to god constantly gobsmacked by the alchemy of making amazement from literal rubbish.

** ‘xtra care’ originally published September 2, 2015.

Please re-enjoy.

After he ate his oniony hotdog, he pushed a piece of gum into his mouth. Tasty as the hotdog had been, he wanted something powerfully refreshing to erase it. As he chewed, the gum came to life: zesty, minty, spicy. Twenty minutes later he disposed of it in the garbage, for gum was not recyclable nor compostable, and he cared; perhaps not in an Xtra sort of way, but to a certain extent. He flicked the gum and the empty pack at the stinking, overstuffed garbage can, not noticing as he walked away that the gum had landed on the rim and sat stuck there, a tiny head, watching him go.

All day people passed the fetid garbage can, sometimes flinging rubbish in. Bits of trash tumbled out and merged into the wider city. Bottle caps rolled into the street and were smashed flat like medals won, or coins of unknown currency – something worth something, somewhere. Gauzy produce bags were lifted high and floated until the branches of trees caught them and held them safe from harm. And all through the afternoon and into the dark, quieting night, the little ball of gum sat, as if waiting for the man to return. An emblem of perseverance, of patience. A nod to the everlasting. Gum, after all, was forever.

Come morning, birds emerged before people stumbled from their houses. Flocks of pigeons swooped circles in the sky and then lined themselves up on sleeping rooftops. But it was a starling who landed on the garbage can and jutted its head toward the little ball of gum. Jut-jut, blink-blink. The yellow beak parted and plucked the gum from the bin. Up up up went the gum, clasped tenderly by the bird’s beak.

From above, it was easy to see how the waking world was criss-crossed with delicate bindings that strained to hold it together: roads and rivers and mountain ranges and rows of buildings and lines of cars and banks of wild grasses and hills and valleys of trash that formed patterns indiscernible from down below. Round as the earth, the little ball of gum had never felt less significant, nor more alive, than in those last beautiful moments before he was returned to the street where everything had begun for him. Down down down he was carried. The starling opened his beak and let the little ball of gum fall out onto the pavement, and in no time he had dried and flattened and made a lasting shape of his own. Day after day the people passed over him, including the man who had purchased him and chewed him and somewhat carefully disposed of him. The man never knew of the gum’s journey, and he went whistling through his days until his days ended.

But the gum knew, and would always remember.

♦

Kristen den Hartog is a novelist and non-fiction writer. Her latest book, The Roosting Box: Rebuilding the Body After the First World War, explores war’s profound impact on ordinary people, and the medical innovations and societal changes it spurred. She lives in Toronto and in Lyndhurst, Ontario.

She can be found at www.kristendenhartog.com

♦♦♦

BIGGEST LITTER PEEVE?

Den Hartog: It often occurs to me that “the litter I see” on city sidewalks is garbage for the body as well: chip bags and chocolate bar wrappers and cigarette butts. Things that shouldn’t have gone in in the first place! Though admittedly I’m guilty of the odd junk-food binge….

discards

Posted: August 2, 2024 in kate rogers
Tags: , , , ,
0

litter.rogers.1

Following the shore, we pace
out spring. Ring-billed
gulls stitch-swoop the sky.
The kingfisher threads
through the growing stand
of sailboat masts, rattles
a warning.

Bare-shouldered townsfolk
pushing strollers, dog walkers
are also drawn to the lake’s
mirror. Carrying Tim Horton’s,
Starbuck’s cups.

Is that a loon? A young couple asks
as we point binoculars, my husband’s
long lens, at its sleek black head.
I nod, hoping to foster a love
of birds.

Two plastic coffee cup lids
roll away like forgotten
frisbees.

Where the early loon glides
among still empty boat slips
hunks of ragged styrofoam bob
and plastic water bottles,
an orange traffic cone.

In the corner of the harbour
near the life-saving ring, a mallard
floats upside down. Is that a plastic
six-pack yoke throttling
its bottle green throat?

Last fall, a loon
washed up on the beach.
A hook poked through its
white necklace, maw gaping
with a thrown back fish.

♦♦♦

Kate Rogers won first place in the 2023 subTerrain magazine Lush Triumphant Contest for her five-poem suite, “My Mother’s House.” Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. Kate’s poems have been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and the Windsor Review. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, launched in the first week of January 2024. Kate’s most recent poetry collection is The Meaning of Leaving. She is Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at: katerogers.ca/

♦

Photo courtesy of Kate Rogers.

♦

♦

metamorphoses

Posted: July 2, 2024 in leslie prpich
Tags: , , , , ,
0

pripich

Days past I chased butterflies, enticed
by vibrant colour, mesmerized
by random motion, lured
by metamorphic possibilities of flight.

What is a butterfly but winged contradiction,
patterned unpredictability aloft?

I rest / come to ground / gather stones.

Stones too entice, with
muted colour, with
stillness, metamorphic
possibility.

Paradoxical: a stone
may be volcanic while inert, a mountain
or a grain of sand.

Scoop / fling / stones too can fly.

♦

♦

Leslie Prpich chases butterflies around an unruly garden on the rocky banks of the Skeena river in northern British Columbia. She writes creative nonfiction, occasional poems, and combistories, some of which can be found at www.commatology.com. 

♦

♦

 

 

 

secrets from the sea

Posted: June 12, 2024 in adrienne fitzpatrick
Tags: , , , , ,
0

fitzpatrick

The sea beckons, hazy white expanse of slippery, glistening rocks, assembled hodge podge – we make our sloppy, tenuous way. Picking paths from the sides of ancient stones. View from these wild old trees, a family of three – it is an enticing mirage. In the end, we didn’t get there. We sweated and swore, didn’t we, and finally unpacked our lunch and ate in the sun, crunched on slimy rocks. Crabs skittled and it was like the sea was seeping up, pincers poking us – wake up from the dream that is the sea – was the message. Sandwiches soggy, smushed apple slices in bags and candy wrapped in blue and pink foil, intact and perfect in our mouths.

These trees watched us stagger out, squabble, stagger back. Decades they have watched the dreamers venture, toil, despair, come back to the refuge of trunks, branches, their conversation deep underground tingling up my legs. I stand in the centre as you wander off, looking for an easier way. Gazing up as the trunks and branches wend grey sinew ribbons in the sky. A holy place and a place to stash junk in Easter colours, like presents, bright oval eggs. Secret refuse in pretty packages that maybe no one will see – that may have floated in from the sea.   

♠

♠

Adrienne Fitzpatrick grew up in the north and returned to complete her Masters in English at the University of Northern British Columbia; her creative thesis won the John Harris Prize for the best in Northern Fiction. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Prairie Fire, CV2, subTerrain, The New Quarterly and Thimbleberry. Her art reviews have appeared in Border Crossings, C Magazine and Canadian Art and book reviews in the BC Review. She explores the phenomenological experience of place in her work and her first book, The Earth Remembers Everything is based on her experiences travelling to massacre sites in Europe, Asia, the Central Interior and Northwest Coast of BC; it was also short-listed for the 2014 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. Instructions for a Flood, based on her experiences of living and working with Indigenous Nations in the Central Interior and Northwest of BC, came out from Caitlin Press in May 2023.

“your children are not your children”

Posted: May 9, 2024 in hollay ghadery
Tags: , , , ,
0

ghadery

 

I need this concession: every milestone is an admission of defeat   first smile   first word   first step   first time on a train   first shutting of bedroom door in your face   each seal-clapped celebration   a marker of time  every first   a last  a page curling at the edges   a day we once held each other fast   fetal and milky with sleep

♦

♦

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is scheduled for release with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a co-host of Angela’s Bookclub on 105.5 FM, as well as HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. 

♦

♦

(Image courtesy of Rona Maynard)

(Title, Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet)

♦

the ways i’ve been feeding it

Posted: February 21, 2024 in rayanne haines
Tags: , , , ,
0

litter - haines

this past summer, a little high,
i plunged into the pacific. shoved
an empty bottle of lager, all
that was left in the fridge, under
my beach bag so, i wouldn’t forget it

at the end of the day. the tide comes in
and swallows the beach. in the saltwater,

i float, gulping back the grief that still comes
unbidden. the pain of mother loss acts like sea suck.

the give and take, the mostly take. the ache pulled
through my throat each time i try to breathe past this loss.

a nudist, half-hidden behind a collection
of driftwood offers space. a kind of easy

companionship. neither of us asking anything
of the other. each of us ignoring what the other wants

to hide. his flesh. my guilt. an addiction squirming
below skin. and i’m trying not to drown in it.

no extraordinary measures

the thing is, after my mother’s death
i drank myself tattered for a little while.
there is some measure of relief
in recognizing this. the way aching made
me ravenous. and now, the way I’ve begun
to think of grief as a sapling. the ways, i feed it.
i do not know if it was better to starve.

♦

♦

Rayanne Haines (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, the creator and host of the literary podcast Crow Reads, the President for the League of Canadian Poets and an Assistant Professor with MacEwan University. Her 2021 hybrid poetry collection, Tell the Birds Your Body is Not a Gun won the Stephan G. Stephansson Alberta Literary Award and was shortlisted for both the Robert Kroetch award and the ReLit Award. She’s been published in the Globe and Mail, Minola Review, Fiddlehead, Grain, Prairie Fire and others. A CNF poetry and essay collection exploring grief after mother loss, identity, and gendered trauma is forthcoming from Frontenac House September 2024 

daylighting

Posted: February 3, 2024 in theresa kishkan
Tags: , , , ,
2

kishkan

I am looking at old maps of Vancouver showing the buried creeks, blue lines forming a tangle under the grid of streets, the names almost forgotten: Salish Stream, Spanish Banks Creek, Still Creek: their sibilant waters under parks, under streets, meandering just below the surface of parking lots and shopping malls, still alive in family stories danced into being, in dance itself along Brewery Creek, its remaining shadow on streets and alleys . Where the creeks begin: in seepage, in snow-melt, in small springs rising from slopes, they begin, a trickle, gathering, growing, they become themselves, cascading over stones, wearing channels in rock, runoff and groundwater, fringed with willows, salmonberry, alders, they find their own patient way to lakes or harbours, they empty, little riffles over the sand and pebbles.  Their courses fill with rain, fallen leaves, the exoskeletons of mayflies, dragonflies, drowned navigator shrews who misjudged distance from bank to bank, a sodden paper bag, forgotten bottles of wine left by lovers who picnicked then walked into the sunset, arms wrapped around each other.  I am looking at old maps of Victoria, threaded with Bowker Creek, Cecelia Creek, Johnson and Rock Bay Creeks, East Creek and Fairfield Creek in the Ross Bay Cemetery where as a child I pressed my ear to the ground, expecting to hear the dead and instead, water, water, lilting in its pipes and brickworks, the weight of trees planted a century before, headstones, mausoleums, families united finally in small fenced plots. I am looking at maps. I am remembering the sound of water underground, the mint growing in the damp ground where a creek passed under a park across from our house on its way to Ross Bay, and I am remembering a walk along Colquitz Creek when a section long-buried was daylighted after years of hard work on the part of volunteers, a stray balloon still tied to a tree after the celebration; I remember hearing voices of school children eager to release their hatchery salmon, a few dogs up to their ankles, the last of the orchard trees quickening to the sound of riffles, birdsong, a dipper fishing for insects in the quick water, the old culvert left in the grass.

♦♦♦

Theresa Kishkan lives on the Sechelt Peninsula with her husband, John Pass, in a house they built and where they raised their 3 children. She has published 16 books, most recently Euclid’s Orchard, a collection of essays about family history, botany, mathematics, and love (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2017); a novella, The Weight of the Heart (Palimpsest Press, 2020), in which a young graduate student attempts to create a feminist cartography with the works of Ethel Wilson and Sheila Watson; and Blue Portugal and Other Essays (University of Alberta Press, 2022), a collection of lyrical essays. Her books have been nominated for many awards, including the Hubert Evans Award and the Ethel Wilson Prize. Her interests include textiles, ethnobotany, music, human and physical geography, and colour theory, strands of which are braided together in Blue Portugal. Current work-in-progress includes a novel, Easthope, and a long essay about the male gaze, painters and their models, and obsession.

She can be found online here.

♦

♦

the sky is falling

Posted: December 31, 2023 in joan conway
Tags: , , , ,
1

a piece landed at your feet
like a blue bird’s wing,
which you picked up
and folded
into an uneven square,
pressed it into the breast pocket
of your plaid jacket,
the one you found
at the thrift store
on the discount rack,
it was too big but you liked
the way it hung
loose at the sleeves,
covering your hand’s thin bones,
which fluttered unexpectedly
especially when drinking tea,
causing it to slosh
onto the paper napkin,
this too you folded,
lining up the edges
into triangles –
a kite or a paper plane,
something to propel you
into that open space
untethered

♦♦♦

Joan Conway’s love for the culture and geography of Northern British Columbia strongly influences her work. She sees her writing as an avenue to create social change, build community, and to celebrate life. She is published in several anthologies and literary journals. Most recently her poetry appears in ‘don’t tell: family secrets’ (Demeter Press, 2022) and Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine, 2022, for her creative nonfiction. Joan recently launched her memoir ‘Weave As A River’, 2023. 

She is the co-editor for Fresh Voices, an online publication for the League of Canadian Poets.

joanconwaywriter.com

https://greenblossomstudio.wordpress.com

when the sun goes down

Posted: July 1, 2023 in kathryn mockler
Tags: , , , ,
0

mockler

When the sun goes down, close your eyes, and I’ll tell you a story.

It’s a story about a wave—a big one, the kind that threatens an undertow if you’re not careful.

This is not advice but a warning.

In this story, I will be a stone, and you can be a seashell or a fishbone or the head of a plastic doll with blue hair someone’s child left behind. On the ride home, when the child remembers the doll, his favourite doll, whose head he gleefully ripped from its body and tossed aside, he cries out—a long and remorseful cry—but it’s too late to turn back now and retrieve it.

The trick, if there is one, is to wash up on the shore and not get dragged down to the bottom of the ocean.

Sometimes the water is calm, but not today, not in this story.

Yes, of course, if you want to be a grain of sand, then be a grain of sand, but you won’t necessarily fare any better.

♦

♦

Kathryn Mockler is the author of the story collection Anecdotes (Book*hug, 2023). She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Books, 2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. She also runs Send My Love to Anyone, a literary newsletter. 

Older Entries
Newer Entries