Postscript: A Covid Diary…

I promised to write something ‘other,’ afterwards. Sometimes, ‘afterwards’ is overwhelming, and can’t be shared right away. It takes time to process major losses in a life, a grief that digs deep to root into your own body. Sometimes, ‘afterwards’ is about pretending or imagining that you are a turtle, and pulling into your shell and building strong walls so that you know you are strong enough on your own, without anyone else to lean on.

Sometimes, the phrase “long hauler” or “Long Covid,” when uttered by a colleague before 8am on an anonymous Tuesday, can strike fear into you, so that your blood runs cold. Sometimes, it takes a few months to say–out loud–that you are not yourself, as you were before you had Covid. These are facts. Anti-maskers, and conspiracy theorists alike, will say that this is paranoia. That’s fine. I know differently. Each day, for me, and I’m sure for many others who also deal with the ‘leftovers’ of Covid–regardless of which incarnation or variant–is frustrating, a reminder, always, that you are not who you once were…and that a virus, a simple virus (maybe?), has done its best work on your body, mind, and even your soul. No one really wants to hear it anyway. They would rather go to a far off island hot spot on March Break, or cast off masks in public places, or pretend that this virus is no longer a threat. They…even though they will not understand, will never know what Covid has wrought in the lives of many who do not (or cannot) speak up–with words on paper, like these, or with words spoken.

*

These are the things:

After all this time, I cannot taste or smell. As a poet, this is devastating. That is all there is–really–to say about it. There is no ‘maybe’ or ‘if’ or ‘perhaps someday.’ Instead, there is reading about smell and taste recovery times on the internet to try and find an answer, there is searching out research about timelines and ‘maybe after six months or a year.’ Imagine that. I am at four months now, and perhaps a bit longer. Four months and a week, likely, but I have never been good at math or science. (That I love to write science poetry astounds me still.) I have stopped counting days and weeks as if my life were a Sinead O’Connor song written by Prince. I have given up hoping for a return to sensory recovery. It is easier that way. Less disappointing. Less crushing, maybe. More realistic, definitely.

A poet friend asked me last week how I was “really doing” while we were at a small, socially distanced literary event. I wasn’t sure that he wanted to know the actual answer. Most people don’t want to know. “I am managing,” is what I answered. Then, he nodded, asked, quietly, carefully, “Is it…all about texture and temperature, then, when you eat food?” I nodded, “Yes. It is all about that now.” There is not much to say after that, mostly because people look as if they either a) don’t want to hear or believe it, or b) feel sorry that this has happened to me, or c) just rush in to say that they know someone who has had Covid, and that it has been ‘very mild’ and ‘like a cold’ and ‘nothing much more’ so they are not worried. They, though, have not had dreams of their dead mother and have not been so weak that they have not left their bed or walked for more than a month. The initial experience is devastating, too, and trauma inducing. I think most Covid people, the ones who it has really deeply affected, just know that no one cares to know or hear it.

It is okay. We all walk different paths, so these experiences of ours, with Covid, are varied. But…they are real…and there are more of us, who struggle still, than you imagine. You would, perhaps, rather pretend that it is better–now that we do not socially distance, or mask in public places, or test, record, and count cases. Ignorance is bliss. We are there now, at the place where ignorance masquerades as bliss in our western society. It makes the people who are okay feel better. For those of us with ‘leftovers,’ that is simply not the case.

I try to remember the taste of coffee. I love it. I make it every morning, in the very early morning hours, and imagine what I remember of its essence: the smell, how it used to fill a room, and the taste, after it has brewed. These things are gone. I try to remember the scent of lavender in the bath. It isn’t there. There are sea salts, and epsom salts, and things that make my tired body relax. There are those things. There is the feel of oil in hot, hot, hot bath water. And, too, there is the idea, when you are sitting in a hot bath, that it is not *hot* enough. No. It is not hot enough because you’ll long for intensity of senses, not just faded watermarks.

Sometimes, waves of sadness wash over me when I’m least expecting it: what was the scent of toast again, burning? Now, it burns and I can’t even sense it, except for the slim fronds of smoke that rise up from the toaster if I’ve forgotten it. What was the scent of my favourite perfume? Karma, from Lush? I buy a small bottle online, have it delivered, spray it on my wrists and try to remember what it was all about, how it made me feel myself. Ghosted, that scent. I test it each morning, thinking I will jar my nose, my brain, back to life. It never works. Not yet, anyway.

These things, though, are only little things. The one that bothers me most is making my way from the bottom of the school to the top. Two sets of stairs. I must go slow, even though I used to go fast. I must take deep breaths, pace them, so that I don’t lose all breath at once. I must…ration the breath that I have left in my lungs. If I rush, hurry, as I used to, I find myself up at the top of the stairs, a bit dizzy and wobbly, gulping under a mask like a fish out of water. “Find a wall,” I tell myself, “don’t panic. Look normal. Find a wall. Put a hand there, up against it. Ground down, into the floor, the earth, and pretend you are a tree. Grow roots.” Then, a breath or few to catch the air, to calm the heartbeat, to gather self to self and be calm inside. If I’m lucky, the dizziness won’t hit at the same time as the breathlessness does. Together, the two are a bit terrifying.

I’m writing this….why?…so that you know how it feels. The province, the country, the world….pretends it is all over, but for those of us with what I like to call “elements of Long Covid” (because the shorter version of that phrase frightens me too much, and I live alone with a dog), it isn’t over. We walk with it in our bodies, our minds, our hearts. We’re the ones who will be wearing masks for much longer than the rest of you. Please know why…or at least imagine it…and think of how it feels to press against it for months after you rise from that sickbed.

A friend who is a writer out west sent me a kind note. “I know you don’t want to think about it…but this is chronic illness now. This is physical and mental.” It is undefined, uncategorized, and often scorned in small, almost passive-aggressive ways within our society. My friend sent me a link to a yoga series. “Try it…” But I found myself avoiding it, dreading it, thinking of how I am weaker than I was, but building myself back up again. Sometimes chronic illness isn’t as visible as you’d imagine, and sometimes disability comes to you in strange, small, covert ways. It took a friend who has dealt with chronic illness and disability to know that I was struggling, to know that I need to come to terms with these new struggles, in a world that ignores them, or wishes they weren’t there, or that just doesn’t want to think that it could all happen to them…more easily than they would imagine.

I lose words now. This is much scarier than it would seem to you, if you are not a writer, and if you are not a teacher. I reach for words…that have vanished…and don’t seem to return. I take a deep breath, lean into the uncertainty, let it teach me the biggest lessons of my life. The fatigue, too, comes in waves, and sends me to bed at 7:30 or 8pm…in a house that is quieter than I’d ever thought it could be.

Today, I lifted a kettlebell and used weights to build physical strength again. I keep at it, three times a week. I get stronger. I am not the strong woman I was in mid-November, when I was far, far stronger. My cardio is negatively affected. Badly. I walk slowly where I used to walk more quickly. I face waves of dizziness a number of times a day, and I find myself off balance, as if my centre of gravity is off, or something…scientific…that I don’t understand. Today, I held a plank for sixty seconds. I used to be able to do that for much longer. I used to be able to do yoga every day. Now, if I stretch out into positions that make me dizzy, I fall. I am not myself. But…I am a new self. I am grateful for the vaccines. And I am grateful for my lungs. Another friend said, kindly, “Your nose, your mouth…they sacrificed themselves for your lungs, for your breath. They’ll come back, the scent and taste of things, once you’ve healed.” I hope…to swim again…in late June…but I sometimes cry to think that will not be there. I have time, though, so I am hopeful.

I am still here. I am weaker…and stronger…all at the same time.

But…do not think it is over, this pandemic. That is where you are courted, manipulated even, by the self-involved, narcissistic illlusions of the “Before Times,” when….really…there’s no return to that place in space. There’s only a new place in space, one that has yet to be discovered or defined…one that requires you to be honest with yourself first, at the core of your being. Start there. Then take a first step. And then another…

Be kind. Be well. Get vaccinated. It will save your life….no matter what the people who don’t believe in science say. You will miss things you once took for granted, but you will still be here…and you will use touch and hearing to make up for the loss of scent and taste.

Blessings ,

k.

Breakthrough Case: A Covid Diary

No one who has had it tells you about what it’s really like until after you say you have it, so when you get it, you’re not sure what your path will be. It’s like a secret society of survivors or something. Before you get too sick, you’ll scour the internet, but please know that you can’t do that for too long because it will terrify you. There’s a stigma to having Covid, and by the time you begin to come out the other end of the journey, you’ll feel you won’t have your sea legs at all. Without the sensual aspects of smell or taste being present in your daily life, totally removed from human contact, you don’t even know if you own your body anymore. It’s someone else’s, maybe, or your own that’s possessed by something that feels like a tempest or a tsunami. You have no control…and that’s an illusion anyway. We make ourselves feel better by pretending we’re in control of our lives, but we often aren’t. We just feel less freaked out when we think we’re in control…so having to accept and let go…is a hard thing to do.

It starts with a sniffle and maybe a tickle at the back of your throat. It feels ,at the beginning of it all, like it’s only a regular winter cold from The Before Times. 

Keeping a bit of Richard Wagamese by my side these days…for good measure.

It’s deceptive and manipulative, like one of those bad boys in those old 80s indie films who sort of seduce you with sweet words and then break your heart because you’re always the nerdy shy girl. Judd Nelson in The Breakfast Club, maybe. Judd Nelson before he’s redeemed himself by the end of the movie. Covid’s a player who just rushes in, takes what he wants–wham, bam, thank you Ma’am–and then leaves you flattened.

It starts with a sniffle but then you feel it root down inside you like a fierce weed. The headache is the thing. It’s Shakespearean. It clamps onto your skull; it hurts to move your eyes from side to side. That part—the headache—will be your constant companion for the entire time you have Covid. Before you even get your test results, you’ll have that headache, a relentless cough, dizziness, and a fever. (The other things—diarrhea, pink eye, nausea, body aches—they all come a bit later, in waves.) Even your eyelids hurt.

You’ll pull the blinds down because you end up walking around your house half dressed, almost naked, randomly turning down the heat and then jerking it up again for a number of days and nights. You’ll sweat buckets sitting still and then you’ll get up to get a glass of water and start to shiver until you shake. You’ll sink to the kitchen floor and put your cheek against a cool cupboard door and wonder if it’ll end. Your head never stops aching. Your collarbones are more sculpted after two and a half weeks, the result of a lack of appetite and nausea combined. You’ll lose weight, but it’s a diet you never want to be on.

You’ll wonder why the woman from Public Health Ontario reassured you that this is all normal when you croaked out your symptoms over the phone. After all, she’s been on the phones through the pandemic, likely, and she must hear thousands of people’s incredulous comments all the time. You’re a ‘mild’ case. Because you’ve been vaccinated, you’ll be okay…but you’ll walk through a bit of hell first.

The doctor who calls you from the hospital to take your medical history thinks you’d already been told you were positive by the local health district. You hadn’t, but you know.  Three days in and your body feels possessed by something you can’t see. 

“You mean they haven’t called to tell you yet?” 

“No. But I kind of figured it out. It’s…different.”

“I’m sorry to tell you this. They should’ve called first. Probably backed up with all the new cases.” 

“Fuck. And I have followed the rules. And I’m double vaxxed.” 

A sigh, then. “Thank you for doing that, for getting vaccinated. You’re sick right now, but you would be much sicker if you hadn’t been vaccinated. You might be in hospital instead.” 

“Fuck. Uh, sorry. I shouldn’t be swearing. You’re trying to help me and I’m swearing on the phone, but I think I’m kind of in shock, you know? I mean, I did it all properly.” You say it with your throat on fire, but she doesn’t know that. She just wants your medical history. You’re wondering how you’ll navigate the next period of time, terrified and uncertain about how the symptoms seem to come in waves, intensify, and then back up to let others arrive. The cycling of symptoms is disconcerting. It throws you off.

“It’s okay. I’d probably say the same thing if I were you, too. This one’s a bastard. Sneaky.”

***

Loss of taste and smell doesn’t happen quickly. A few days before they disappeared, before I even knew I was positive, I had a lavender salt bath.  Sitting there, feeling sick and achey, letting the heat seep into me, trying to relax a sick body, I took a breath. Something seemed ‘less than’, fainter than normal. Afterwards, I slathered body butter on my skin. Sitting naked on the side of the bed, I leaned down to sniff at the crook of my elbow. Faint, faint scent of coconut. Then, a sick feeling in my chest, I bent my head to sniff at my knee. Same faint, faint scent. Ghosting itself.

I’m a scent grounder; the thing that keeps me calm and centred in life is scent. I love scented candles, essential oil, and I burn incense all the time, too. I also love perfume. Heading back into the bathroom to sniff at perfume bottles in the medicine cabinet, I was coming to the realization that scent was fading fast. And that made it all real.  

A day and a bit after being declared ‘positive,’ I stood in a morning kitchen, shaky and coughing, pulling a mandarin orange out of the fridge. I peeled it into my open palm, noticing that the scent was absent. I bent my head down to the tiny orange, took a deep breath through congestion, and realized all scent was gone. Pulled off a tiny wedge and knew that this was bad. You can have a test result as a positive, but it’s something different to have the effects—to lose all sense of taste or smell. I put that tiny wedge in my mouth, closed my eyes, and said a little prayer. Might’ve been the default of a Hail Mary as my Gram Ennis possessed me for a minute. I bit down. No taste.

An orange, without taste or scent, is only texture: ‘orange’ is now cold, fibrous, and leaves you trying to recall what ‘orange’ tastes and smells like. (A quick Google search tells you that you might get your sense of smell back earlier if you try to remember, to imagine, what a certain thing smelled or tasted like. Imagine carrots in a homemade soup left on your doorstep, or imagine the essential oil you love to burn, or the smell of bread toasting in a toaster. It doesn’t work. You’ll burn things on the stove because you won’t smell them burning. Even soup can burn.)

I started to cry then, trying to remember ‘orange’ and realizing that it wasn’t all a mistake—that this test result was true.  I cried for a little while that day, coughing as I went, worrying that I wouldn’t ever be able to taste or smell food again. Without those senses, and as someone who is a sensual being and poet, the world got much darker and scarier. To say anything else would be a lie. It’s the thing that is most awful through spending time with Covid.

So much of the joy we have in life, whether we think it or not, is about being able to taste and smell things. Try it, just now, and see how often those two senses are part of your day. Imagine not having access to them, and then imagine not knowing when (or if) they’ll return. The notion of eating—these days—is something that revolts and upsets me. I do it, sipping up soup left at the doorstep by a few friends, but it’s something I do to keep up my energy, to fight the virus.

*

Covid was just a statistic on a graph, until I had it arrive in my life in a tangible way. For the first part of the pandemic, I knew the stats on a daily basis and watched the Prime Minister online every day at 11 a.m. Then, this summer, I had the sense of great relief of having been vaccinated twice. I’ve never wanted something as badly as I wanted that vaccine and waiting for the second dose was painful. After the second dose, it seemed to me that life could almost return to the semblance of normal. And, it did, in a strange way; I could attend concerts safely outdoors, or go to a play at the theatre centre with half capacity seating and masks on. It felt comforting to know that being double vaxxed would be a shield, a suit of armour.

But the point in my writing is that people should know it’s a rough ride, to have Covid even after you’re double vaxxed. The first part of it will seem like a regular cold, but the middle parts will feel like sheer hell. It also picks you up and takes you right out of your regular life. You can’t think to read books or watch any Netflix movies. You can try to write, but things just come in little pockets of ideas and then you need to sleep again. This essay is the result of little paragraphs jotted down over a number of days and then patchworked together. It isn’t smooth. It doesn’t feel like me, but—then again—I don’t feel like me.

The end part is full of fatigue, so much so that you wonder if that part will ever actually end, as one day you’ll feel a bit stronger, but the next you’ll need to sleep for sixteen hours straight and then force yourself to swing your legs over the edge of the bed and stand up.

*

Fatigue is something I’ve never experienced before. For too many days, I sleep most of the day and night away. I get up to drink water, shower, and eat soup. I make myself do these things. A few people know I’m sick and so they’ve been texting me to check on me and leave me homemade soup on the front step or try and bring food that might seem ‘appetizing.’ Thing is, food isn’t really appetizing when you can’t smell or taste it. It becomes tagged in your head as only either ‘hot’ or ‘cold.’ Food becomes a tasteless texture. Lentil soup is wet sand. Yogurt is cool silk. Tea is just ‘hot.’

Your world gets infinitely smaller when you have Covid. People on social media have active, exciting lives and that just makes you cry a bit more because you feel left out, sort of forgotten. You are replaceable. This is what you learn. And so, you think about just leaving social media entirely, because it hurts to see people living normal lives when yours is so broken at the moment.

I wanted to focus on the physical symptoms in this blog. I did. I might write another entry at a later date about the psychological warfare that this disease serves you up on a platter. It fucks with your head. There’s a brain fog, and there are awful dreams that wake you up. I’m not a big dreamer, but every night brings a new dream that is much too vivid and upsetting. The headache, too, that never seems to leave…is something I can’t fathom. I’ve almost accepted that it’ll be here forever. Or that’s what it feels like anyway. The body aches, too, leave much to be desired.

*

If you think you’re safe with two vaccine shots, you’re not. If you think you’re going to avoid or escape it, you likely won’t. If you think that vaccines don’t work because I’m sick now with Covid, you’re wrong. I know that my double vaccination means that I won’t be hospitalized or die. The people I talk with on my health care team tell me that. While the system for booking a test didn’t work well for me, online, and while I had to wait three hours to get my call answered to book a test, I am still grateful. I feel like shit these days, and I can’t get out of bed very often, and I miss my regular days and my hikes out into the bush and down near the lake. I miss my yoga, kettlebells, Russian Twists, and planks more than I can say. I can’t think straight and this is terrifying for me. I can’t read for long periods of time, and this is also terrifying for me. I’m training myself to read again, for longer periods of time.

*

A week and a half in, the man in the space suit came to the side door, introduced himself and set up a wireless unit in my writing and yoga room, and then proceeded to do an intake session. Space helmet, medical gown, big gloves, but a kind voice. Then, every day after, I take my vitals twice a day on the tools he left behind for me, and those numbers go springing off across a wireless space to him, and also to my doctor. The paramedics track my oxygen saturation, pulse, and blood pressure, then check in every day by phone, asking for an update of symptoms and telling me not to be discouraged. Having a history of asthma and a bit of Symbicort in my bag wherever I go is enough to worry the medical people. That makes me nervous, too…  

This isn’t a normal virus, one paramedic tells me, when I whine about how it doesn’t seem to ‘get better’ and only seems to shift shapes. He minds my lungs for me. A half day sitting up is okay, is excellent, he says, but 18 hrs of sleep is also okay, until the deepest part of the fatigue passes. Another week, the paramedic tells me on the phone, and I might be less fatigued. I can’t even imagine it; I can’t get out of bed or off the couch. For now, the paramedics say, sleep will help your body heal. It’s going through a lot. He tells me to lean into that fatigue. (I want to thank, especially, Ryan and Heather from the Community Paramedic Program at the City of Greater Sudbury…for kind words in person and on the phone. They made me feel I was going to improve, when I wasn’t so sure.)

*

I am well cared for by a few people I have told. If you want to do something good, something important, then get yourselves vaccinated, and get your children vaccinated. Any adult who doesn’t have a medical reason for not being vaccinated, in my mind now, is selfish and not thinking beyond themselves. Anti-vaxxers are selfish idiots who, if faced with cancer, would surely take a regime of chemotherapy and radiation, but will still not go beyond themselves to think of how their inaction has a real ripple in our community, our province, our country.  I used to have a low tolerance for anti-vaxxers…but now I have no tolerance. If you’re an anti-vaxxer and you’re reading this, please unfollow or unfriend or fuck right off.

Science is the thing to follow, and I’m grateful that my double vaccination has kept me at home, rather than in hospital. Despite the struggle of feeling possessed by something foreign and really uncomfortable, I know that my recovery is due solely to those vaccines. And, too, don’t ask someone with Covid if they’re better. Better to just text “How are you feeling?” or “How are you doing?” than “Why aren’t you better yet?” It only makes someone with Covid feel like they’re less strong than they already are, and that’s a hard thing when you can’t leave your body or your house. I’ve learned that it doesn’t work that way, the ‘getting better’ thing. A regular cold, yeah, sure, but with Covid, you might get three hours of ‘I think I feel better now’ and then ten of ‘Nope…guess not.’

It’s a fucker, Covid is. Please mind yourselves over the Christmas break. It’s not done with us yet.

That time when you have to stay home across the province, but schools can stay open…

Another big wave, tsunami-fashioned. Third? Fourth? Fifty-six and a half? Which wave? Which year? Which incarnation?

Another “State of Emergency.”

Another lockdown that isn’t really a lockdown, and might be called a ‘mockdown’ instead.

And a woman writing a blog, wondering what’s going on…listening to the birds waking up outside her window, and the sound of an ambulance wailing down Paris Street.

This is me writing as a teacher first. I’m not a parent, so I can only empathize with those of you who are during this pandemic, but I am–as the Ontario Education Act of 1990 says–someone who acts “in loco parentis” to my students, and I have since September 2001, when I began teaching.

That’s thousands of young people who’ve come through some classroom door and spent time with me. That’s hundreds of kids, too, who have, when frustrated with something, raised their voices to me and said “But, yeah, Mom…listen…” That’s hundreds, too, I know, who have sat crying at desks with me sitting next to them after class, a light hand on an elbow to reassure them that it will be okay when the world around them seems to be falling into a state of despair and shit. So. They are my kids, even though they aren’t mine, and I’ve loved each one–even the ones who frustrated and confused me. Those ones, to be honest, are the ones who’ve taught me the biggest, most important life lessons. And, there are two who have died, whom I think of more often than you’d imagine. Their names and faces, their voices–Deirdre and Jordan–are tattooed on my heart, and it aches when I think of how they left too soon.

Further contextualizing my identity–I’m a straight, white woman, and I’m a settler. I’m past middle age now. I have white privilege. I don’t appropriate other cultures. I’m a survivor of mental illness. I know that some stories aren’t mine to tell, and I respect that. I tell my own story. I know my three university degrees come from that white privilege I just mentioned. My parents were working middle class, so I’m the first one in my immediate family with a university degree. My sister followed, so she became the second one. I value education deeply because of this, and because of the way in which my parents taught me to value reading, writing, books, and about giving back to the society in which I live. And, well, though it should be fairly obvious by now, I’m a poet and a writer.

I’m a listener, more than a talker, and I’m fairly shy, even though most people wouldn’t think that when they see me in public spaces. I think before I speak, and I only speak–with great passion and a clear voice–if I feel very, very strongly about something. I tell the truth. I’m honest. I can’t lie. I also can’t leave out my truths and say that that’s not lying. That would still be lying in my books. (This might come from having tried to lie to a nun back at Marymount in Grade 13, while I was trying to escape an afternoon pep rally because I was being bullied by some popular girl, but that’s a whole other blog. The only time I tried to lie, to that nun, in a portable hallway, I turned bright red, mumbled and stuttered, and she called me on it. Since then, well, I just can’t lie.) I’m private, and it takes a while to coax me out of my turtle shell. Lots of people don’t stick around for long because of that. I have a hard time trusting people. That comes from childhood trauma stuff. It’s hard. It’s complex. I don’t like it, but I deal with it. I’m a work in progress. And I’m proud of how far I’ve come, in such a short time.

There. I’ve contextualized myself and my identity. Now…here’s what I have to say about all of this:

This most recent ‘State of Emergency’ doesn’t feel very emergency-like to me. Not at all. When I sit with my Grade 12 students online every day, and when I ask them how they’re doing in the pandemic, I get a variety of responses. Most times, they start off as comments firing through the chat box on Google Classroom, but soon enough, they end up being kids unmuting themselves and chatting about what they think. They do this when they are most unsettled or when they want guidance, but don’t know where to go. They know, I think, that I’ll listen, and that I’ll try to help them walk through this shit storm. At least, I hope they know that…even though I’m teaching from my tiny dining room table.

When we’ve talked about the pandemic in my class before, I asked my students what acts as ‘an anchor’ or ‘a lighthouse’ to them in these difficult times. The responses have varied: “I bake things,” “I have an indoor herb garden,” “I work out,” “I watch TV with my parents on the couch at night,” and even “I like to walk outside when it rains.” That one was, of course, my favourite. Then we talk about what they’re frustrated about. They’re missing the things they so looked forward to for such a long time: “Semi-formal and fancy dresses, high heels, and then dancing in bare feet to really loud music,” “The Gallery Run” (a tradition at the school where I teach), “Prom,” “Grad,” “friends,” “sleep overs,” “going to the mall,” “Spirit Week,” “Winter Carnival,” and even “The Caf.” They are missing the things that gathered them together, in The Before Times.

Then they talk about what’s been happening in Ontario. They are frustrated. They wonder why it’s this ‘back and forth thing.’ They ask why it’s a lockdown if the big box stores are open. They watch their parents worry about their jobs, and they watch their parents lose their jobs, and they watch their parents struggle emotionally in front of them while trying to pretend everything is okay. We’re all just…trying to pretend it’s okay. Maybe, I was thinking yesterday, we should stop doing that? We’re exhausting ourselves by acting ‘normal’ in a very not normal time on the planet. Why can’t we just admit that this has been a year unlike any other? People have lost jobs, marriages, lovers, homes, families, and yes, even friends. Things have disappeared without warning. Global pandemics have this effect, apparently. You just need to find your flutter board and hold on tight. You need to “Just keep swimming.” (#dory)

How do teachers fit into the puzzle or equation? We’re the ones who are ‘in loco parentis.’ While we’re mostly vilified by the public across the province, we love your kids more than you know. And, to be honest, we’re sometimes the only ones who some kids can look to for help. Those are the ones I’ve been worrying about lately–the kids who are marginalized by society before they have a chance to learn how to walk. These are the kids who come from really broken families, from families that struggle with inter-generational cycles of addiction issues, poverty, and abuse. These are the kids who get kicked out of their houses late at night, and who then crash in their friends’ basements for months on end. These are the kids who depend on breakfast clubs and on school buildings that are heated in the winter months. These are the kids…who I worry about a lot.

But…I worry about all of my other kiddos, too. They’re struggling. They are. They’re resilient, though, so I want you to know that. They are. In fact, I think they’re behaving better than a lot of adults I know lately. They’re honest, true, and they are connected by their virtual networks. They are, and I can tell you this with great certainty, aware and astute about how to stay in touch through their cell phones. And, every few days, I remind them to reach out to someone they haven’t heard from in a while. Where did that person go? Did they disappear? Maybe a text or call? Holiday weekends are bad for me, so I reminded them last Friday to reach out to someone who might be on their own. Or…maybe that person is just on another path. We talk about paths a lot these days in my class…and about how we will navigate our way through this mess…and come out on the other side as better, kinder, and more compassionate humans. They are teaching me the biggest lessons of my life.

They want to know, in the last few months, why a lockdown isn’t really a lockdown. I want to know that, too. I want to know how it is that I’ve been a bubble on my own with a dog, following suggested rules, battling loneliness, and writing a lot of new stuff, while watching people out in groups, living as if…nothing is really going on. So, I tell them I don’t have that answer for them. I tell them that sometimes grown ups don’t know how to lead, or that they pretend to lead because they have a certain plaque on their office door, or because they think letters behind their names mean that they’re better than other people. I tell them…that we can only do our best. They say…”We don’t want people we love to get sick, so we follow the rules.” And I say, ‘I know. Me, too…’ And they say, “Do the other people…not want to think about everyone else? Because we…are ‘everyone else’…” And then I just want to cry.

They want to know why people aren’t thinking about other people…and I don’t really know how to answer that anymore. And that worries me. A lot.

My students want to know why it isn’t a real lockdown.

I do, too.

People in power, in Ministries of Education, in tall office towers of school boards around the province, and people who haven’t taught in a while…or people who might never have taught a day in their life, might have forgotten what it means to be with kids in a classroom–real or virtual, or hybrid–all day, every day. They won’t, then, even know what it means to walk a kid through a pandemic, in person and online. They won’t know what it means to teach in a ‘hybrid’ fashion. They won’t know what it means to wear a medical mask for hours a day, and to want a HEPA filter so badly that you might cry when the maintenance guy comes to install it. They won’t know what it is to feel frustration when the school wifi doesn’t work and twenty-five kids are out there, somewhere, waiting for you to start class. And, they won’t know what it’s like to yell over a HEPA filter, through a mask, and to worry that your mask obscures the way your face moves to show and express emotion. For the kid who is on the spectrum, that matters. For the kid who doesn’t get your sense of humour, or who can’t know you because you’re rushing through a quad in eight or nine weeks, and whose feelings might be hurt if they can’t see you smile as you chat with them, that matters.

The human side of this matters.

I’m wondering a few things this morning:

~How come kids’ mental health hasn’t been an issue before the pandemic? I mean, it was, on the radar, and has been for a number of years now, but now it’s being used as a way to convince people that having kids sitting in desks in classrooms, in school buildings, is the only answer to keeping them mentally healthy. That’s not true, though. The thing is…a kid can’t be mentally healthy if they’re at risk of being infected with Covid, or anxious about bringing that virus back into their house, where they might live with an immunocompromised sibling, parent, or grandparent. Because there are more of those kids in classrooms than you might imagine, and they’re anxious *coming* to school. Please, let’s don’t forget about these kids…because they are the ones who might not be sleeping well, or who might be struggling in classes because of their worries.

~Covid is on the buses. I hate to tell you this, especially if you’re under the false assumption that it isn’t. But…one only need to look at various cities, and follow the bus routes, and see how things have sprung up around communities and schools.

~That point leads me to this big point which is…you guessed it…why it’s necessary to close schools for a while. If we’re in a ‘State of Emergency’ and this is a ‘lockdown,’ how are schools allowed to remain open? How is that safe while other things aren’t? The incongruity of it all is what boggles the mind. It boggles the minds of my Grade 11s and 12s, so if they’re wondering what’s going on, I’m sure some adults must be wondering, too…or I hope so, anyway.

~What’s affecting the mental health of kids most, if you ask me, because I spend time with them every day, is how it all works. They don’t understand why some things are allowed and some aren’t. They want structure. They want someone in charge who will lead them to safety. They want a person who…when you’re walking through a dark forest some night while on a camping trip…the kind of person who you can grab onto the hem of the back of their shirt or jacket…and let them guide you through the darkest, scariest, most intimidating parts of the walk. They want that. Who doesn’t want that, at this point?

~Education workers who work with kids special education needs will be vaccinated next week, during the delayed Spring Break week. This is good news, but it’s late in coming. Much. Too. Late. Similar stories out of Alberta, on Twitter yesterday. Ted McCoy, a professor at the University of Calgary, tweeted that there are approximately 50,000 teachers in Alberta, and about 400,000 vaccine doses in freezers. See…here’s the issue: people really like to hate teachers. It’s always the ‘summers off’ comment, but I have yet to see anyone jump feet first into education just for the summers off. The teachers I have had the pleasure and honour of working alongside over the last twenty years are people who love kids, who love learning, and who have a natural sense of curiosity about the world around them. Too, they really have this notion that teaching the next generation is a privilege, and an honour. So…I wonder about that, the teacher bashing. But, I’ve dealt with it since I became a teacher back in 2001, so I know it’s not going away anytime soon.

~I’m aware of fellow teachers who have dealt with Covid in their homes, while continuing to teach virtually, and who have worried about bringing it home to their families, or to those–like me–who live alone and are aware of what it would mean to care for themselves if they were to be infected. We are both sides of the same horrible coin. And, I’m aware of those teachers who have been hospitalized, and I’m especially thinking of one woman who died, and another who remains in critical condition–now intubated in hospital–because she went to school to teach kids. That could’ve happened virtually…but didn’t. That’s wrong.

~I’m thinking of the kids whose parents work at Laurentian University today, too. I know that they’re under an incredible amount of stress. Here in Sudbury, those kids are learning virtually, because we’ve been in the Grey Zone due to rising case numbers in the last month or so. On top of trying to manage their fears of the virus, of becoming ill or spreading it to someone they love without knowing, and on top of missing their friends and extended family members, and on top of just trying to breathe deeply…those kids — at elementary and secondary levels of study — are dealing with the uncertainty of a government, and a university, that won’t tell anyone here what’s happening about the future of our northern university until….when??….the middle of next week. That. Is. Like. Water. Torture. And…it’s just unkind. I’m thinking of those kids, too, today…and their parents…and of the entire city.

~And…finally…I’m thinking about colleagues who have had to go on stress leaves…because, make no mistake, this is stressful. Our school staffs are families. We worry about one another. Sometimes, we’ve worked together for decades. Seeing people you’ve worked with for twenty years have to go on sick leave, or retire, because of the pandemic stress, is a punch in the heart. The retirements might be the hardest to watch, because these are the educators who are the veteran stars who guide future generations of teachers. We’re losing mentors inside our educational system, and no one’s really thought about that…I don’t think. Maybe…someone should.

***

This is a long blog. Sorry. And also–NOT SORRY.

This is National Poetry Month and today I’m thinking about someone who meant a lot to me, as a poet and as a vocal advocate for causes he cared about. He didn’t mince words. He was honest, even when it wasn’t popular. He had a voice and used it. He told his truth. He didn’t hold back. So. This is me doing that, using my voice. Too many of us, as teachers, bite our tongues in public, for fear of being chastised. And, well, maybe it’s time we didn’t do that as much, especially given the nature of what’s been going on in schools.

In my favourite poem of his, “Sailboat,” Gord Downie wrote about how we can think about our lives in bigger ways. Ripples, you know? What we do, what we say, matters. Being honest matters. Speaking truths matters. Being brave matters. If you’re lucky, in this world, during these so-difficult-days, “the most you can do is/spend all your time/giving some of your time/meaning.”

This is me. This is me…making meaning.

I hope you all stay well, and that you are lucky enough to have other people in your bubbles, and that you’ll do your best–as teachers and parents–to speak up for our kids and education workers.

That’s what I hope for…but I don’t know anymore. And that makes me sad…

peace,

k

A message for those of us who are women who walk: in memory of Sarah Everard

I cannot stop thinking of Sarah Everard. 

She deserves her own sentence, standing alone above this paragraph, to suit the gravitas of what’s happened to her, because she ought not to be forgotten. To have been a woman walking, just someone on her way home, and then to have been killed by a man, a police officer at that, is simply horrific. On March 3, she was walking home from a friend’s house. She never got home. She was just 33 years old. 

She did everything right. She wore bright clothes and running shoes. She took a well-lit and busy route through a London park, and was speaking to her boyfriend on her cell phone as she walked. She was careful. And still she was kidnapped and murdered. Her boyfriend reported her missing the next day, when he and members of her family didn’t hear from her when they expected to. She had disappeared. On March 10, her remains were found in Ashford, Kent, and a 48 year old police officer was taken into custody and charged with her kidnapping and murder. (I want Sarah Everard’s name remembered, and not his, so I’m purposefully choosing not to use his name here in this blog entry.) 

Charlie Mackesy’s tribute to Sarah Everard.

Gender based violence happens around the world. We know that. Women especially know that. Here, in Canada, over 67% of Canadians know of a woman who has experienced physical or sexual abuse. In Canada, Indigenous women are more likely to be killed at six times the rate of non-Indigenous women. Every night, across this nation, approximately 6,000 women and children stay in shelters because it isn’t safe for them to be at home anymore. Every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. These are facts. You can read more about gender based violence at the Canadian Women’s Foundation website. Avoiding the issue doesn’t make it go away. This week, for instance, a 17-year old, Jenny Winkler, was stabbed to death by a 19- year old boy, in Alberta. Gender based violence is everywhere—from London to Alberta, to Atlanta, to Sudbury. 

I want to talk about walking and what it means to me, as a human, but as a writer, and as a woman. We are all ‘wholes’ made up of ‘parts.’ I have always walked, for as long as I can remember. It is something that helps me to deal with any challenges I may encounter—mentally, creatively, and spiritually—and it helps me to open myself to new ideas in my writing. When I get stuck on something I’m writing, I either walk or dance. I do both rather forcefully. I’m not a ‘stroller’ when I walk, and I’m a bit wild when I dance. (The dog, sadly, is not always impressed by either thing happening…but he’s 13 now, so that’s to be expected…) Physical movement, for me, is a part of a healthy, balanced life.

I walk before dawn, so that I can see the sun rise over Lake Ramsey—my favourite lake for all of my life now—which is in the centre of Sudbury. Part of the reason behind why I bought my house here, just a few blocks from the lake, was so that I could walk along its shores in the very early mornings. I’m not a sunset person. I’m into sunrises. 

These walks have brought me some beautiful memories, but have also had me encountering some very scary men. One of my friends bought some pepper spray last year, and gave me an extra little canister. She also walks through our neighbourhood and up under the Bridge of Nations, and then loops through Bell Park and back up onto Paris. I have written a short story that’s based on an encounter I had with a man a few years ago, down on the boardwalk. There aren’t enough ways to say that—when you walk alone as a woman—how a single man along your route can strike fear into you unlike any other sort of fear you may have felt in your lifetime. You feel it in your whole body. It’s a visceral sort of fear, one that grabs you from the inside out. Seeing a man coming towards you on a dawn walk—when he seems to have dead, shark-like eyes—can make you want to throw up. It can. I know. 

While I was living in Kingsville, I often hiked by myself at Point Pelee Provincial Park, as well as at a number of excellent conservation areas. There’s still one encounter that I had with a man at Maidstone Conservation Area–an oak-hickory wood with beautiful Carolinian trees–that had me nervous and wary about walking and hiking alone for a long time afterwards. That was in March 2018, and I still remember it vividly. I don’t like to recall it, but I do…to remind myself to be careful. Always.

These days, thanks to my friend, Jan, I walk with pepper spray and I keep my cell phone ready in my jacket pocket. A friend who’s a photographer has his studio a couple of blocks from the park, so he gave me his number to text or call if ever I feel at risk. But…still…Sarah Everard was careful. She was smart. And she is still gone now. That we live in a world where women need to be hyper-aware of their surroundings seems something that has always been part of life, but it feels even more nerve wracking this week. It doesn’t matter that Sarah Everard lived in London, and that I live here in Northern Ontario. Women live everywhere, and—the thing is—there aren’t many places that feel safe at all anymore. This is especially true if you’ve experienced sexual harassment or assault, or trauma, that has been inflicted on you by men. Given the scope and sequence of the ‘Me Too’ movement a few years ago, and by the number of us who spoke up, there are very few women who haven’t been harassed by men. Now, on Twitter, there are posts that are tagged with #iamsarah and #letwomenbreathe. Globally, Sarah Everard’s death has made women weep for her loss, and rage at what has happened.

I walk along streets that I have known and loved since I was a girl. They are like a blessed and beautiful litany in my head: McNaughton, Wembley, Marion, St. Brendan, St. Nicholas, Hyland, Winchester, Kingsmount, Roxborough, O’Connor, Laura, Homewood, Edinburgh, Front, Worthington, Ramsey, John, Elizabeth, and Paris. (Not necessarily in that order. My length and the pathways and routes of my walks depend on a variety of variables: the weather, my mood, the time of day, how stuck I am on something I’m writing, the way the light is working in and on the sky, the dog…and the music I choose to listen to as I go.) I grew up playing behind my great-aunts’ house on Kingsmount, exploring through the bush and running down to the path that ran along Junction Creek. Now it has a name. It’s ‘The Roxborough Greenbelt,’ but when I was a little girl, it was just a wild, creative space. The same can be said of the time I spent exploring Dead Man’s Canyon as a child. It brings me great joy now, still, as an adult. In all of these spaces, I find my feet, but I can also find my breath and my heart.

I walk along streets that I will always know and love, staring longingly at houses I have told myself stories about since I was small. I imagine their ‘insides’ and wonder about how the light comes through a bit of stained glass, or how the wood floors might gleam in later afternoon sunlight, or how a lilac will smell with rain dripping from its blooms in late May or early June. 

The other morning, I felt a frisson of fear run through me. A shadowed man, in pre-dawn light, and me walking with my small dog, down near the long road that skirts the rail yard. This is not an unfamiliar route for me. I have walked it for decades. The shadow of the figure of a man, though, means that you begin to think self-defensively. You can’t afford not to, especially if you’re a single woman without a male partner to walk alongside. So. I put my hand around the pepper spray, I tugged the dog along a bit more quickly, and I pretended to be speaking to someone on my cell phone. Absolutely imagined conversations about a work meeting that would happen at 8:30 that morning, and talk of how the person on the other end of the line should put the washing into the dryer. A mention of where I was walking and when I would be home. These…fictions…are the ways in which you can fashion a bubble of imagined safety for yourself as you walk, as a woman in an urban setting. It worked. It usually does. He could hear I was having a conversation and that was a ‘fourth wall’ that I purposefully created. I kept on my way, thinking of Sarah Everard’s walk, and was determined not to let fear or nervousness stop me from doing a thing I really love to do each and every day. 

My friend Tanis MacDonald’s poetry collection, Mobile, is one I really love because she writes of what it’s like to be a woman who walks every day. I often think of her poem, “Elegy 2,” when I walk past my favourite historic houses in the very early mornings. In it, she writes of what it feels like to be a woman who walks, of how we must be hyper-vigilant. She writes:  

so don’t mistake me
for a girl who doesn’t
know don’t
think I am not
alive and counting
who died
walking home
from the store
or their part-time job
in the winter dark

We women who walk know and recognize one another by our hearts, by our feet, and by our obstinance in just the act of keeping on walking—even when we’re a bit nervous or fearful. To not do so, to not continue walking, would mean giving up the space that we’ve fought so hard to carve out. So many women have come before me, have come before all of us, to ensure that we have spaces we can inhabit in the world. In earlier centuries, independent women who walk, or who speak up, might have been deemed to be threatening. Now, we own the space that’s been carved out by previous women who have gone before. Head up, chest out, shoulders back. Certain, even—sometimes—when you don’t feel that way. 

This week, in London, police officers knocked on doors and warned women to stay home. Trevor Noah has a brilliant bit on YouTube about this, pondering why police are asking women to stay home—especially when some of those women are in abusive relationships where domestic violence means that ‘home’ isn’t safe, either. Noah poses the pointed and timely question of why the members of the London Metropolitan Police—of whom the accused murderer was one—aren’t being more thoughtful of how this murder has affected women in London. Too, he points out the way in which police officers behaved during a weekend vigil held at Clapham Common for Sarah Everard. Why, he wonders out loud, on camera, would the members of the police force not think more carefully about optics in a time when women are peacefully marking the life of someone who was killed while walking home from a friend’s house? 

Sarah Everard’s friends and family say she wouldn’t want her death to become a political movement. She was, as they have told the press this week, “bright and beautiful – a wonderful daughter and sister. She was kind and thoughtful, caring and dependable. She always put others first and had the most amazing sense of humour. She was strong and principled and a shining example to us all. We are very proud of her and she brought so much joy to our lives.” They thanked the police for their work in helping to gather information for the case against the accused. 

On my pre-dawn and dawn walks this week, I have been thinking of Sarah. We are all—all of us who walk on our own—so like her. We take our precautions, we mind ourselves carefully, and we try to be brave and not fearful. We want to be in the world, to take up our rightful space. It isn’t that easy, though. I want to know that I can walk safely, and I can’t be given that assurance as a woman in western society today. That makes me sad inside. But I’m more sad that a young woman has lost her life, and I’m angry that women are still so often victims of gender-based violence. People will say ‘take a self-defense course,’ and yes, I’m sure that would help. People will say that you should just not walk at certain times of the day, but that will just not work. That argument is as archaic as the ones that say you ‘deserve’ to be sexually assaulted if you dress a certain way, or if you drink too much at a dinner party one night. People will say that you should have a walking partner, but that isn’t always in the cards for some of us in the middle of a pandemic. 

The thing is, you see, we should walk just as forcefully as we have walked before now. We should walk with our shoulders back and our heart moving forward. Heart forward, head back. Standing tall. We should walk for Sarah…and for ourselves. 

Sarah Everard

I cannot stop thinking of Sarah Everard. And I cannot stop thinking of her family, friends, and boyfriend.

From where I sit, writing this, I can hear the trains down in the rail yard, and I know that those streets, and the paths that lead through the park, are the places where I love to walk…and where I’ll continue to walk.

She would have loved her walks, too, I imagine…and she had the right to have walked safely home that night. That that right was so horrifically taken from her is a fierce injustice of the highest order.

peace,

k.

A rainy afternoon with Kenojuak Ashevak at the Art Gallery of Sudbury…(and sitting quietly with her owls and ravens…)

How long have I loved Kenojuak Ashevak’s work? I can’t even begin to tell you. She’s just been part of my frame of reference for the longest time, and I’m grateful for her presence in my life. Born in 1927, on Baffin Island, she died in 2013. If you don’t know her name or her work, I hope you come to her through this blog, and that’s because I think she’s just one of the most amazing Inuit artists. You’ll most likely know her through her distinctive owls, ravens, and fish. She was considered ‘the bird artist’ of Cape Dorset, so I’m guessing that’s why I’ve always been drawn to her work…because…if you know me, you know I have a ‘thing’ for birds (and also trees). Someone once asked her about those lovely owls of hers, and she said that “every time she sat down to draw, an owl always seemed to come”(Boyd 15). Ashevak understood how life was connected, and to wander into the Art Gallery of Sudbury these days is to find yourself being still with her work, to feel gathered into her world.

I love the photos of her face…because she has a beautiful, welcoming, and evocative face that tells a story. Some people’s faces are closed up and stoic, or are hard to read. Hers isn’t…wasn’t. I use present tense because she means that much to me. I don’t think she’s really gone…because she lives on in her work. (I think of all artists and writers this way. They don’t really ‘die’ in my mind. They go–from this physical plane–but their work is still alive, full of their creative energy and spirit.) When I see photos of her, I think that Ashevak’s face is so lovely–so very alive, spirited, and full of kindness. Sitting up in Gallery 2 this afternoon, after getting wonderfully drenched with rain on the way into the Art Gallery of Sudbury (AGS), I took a breath in and thought ‘oh, I would have had questions to ask you about your birds…and your mystical women…but instead I’ll just sit here and let them speak to me.’

An old friend of mine has an original Ashevak drawing in her house and, when I used to visit her before the pandemic began, I would try not to stand for too long a time in front of that owl. I didn’t want to seem too moved or overwhelmed by its beauty, but I was. My friend had been up to Cape Dorset for work, and had bought an original drawing. You can linger too long in front of a piece of original art, in a friend’s house, with a glass of white wine in your right hand, and you can find yourself falling into the colours of the owl’s wings and feathers, transported into a place where you find beauty. I do, anyway. Often. I hope people don’t notice me getting all dreamy eyed, but I’m sure that stalking a Kenojuak owl is not a cool thing to do. (Doesn’t matter…because I’ve always been a bit dorky.)

If you take Canadian art history courses, which I did in my undergraduate time at university, you’ll learn about the importance of Cape Dorset to Inuit art. I think I first came to Ashevak at Laurentian University, to be honest, which is one more reason I need to thank the university–and the late Dr. Henry Best in particular–for introducing me to her work. Rather than me babble about it, it’s best to let her speak. This clip is strongest. There are other snippets to find on the internet, including a strange 1963 National Film Board documentary titled–rather archaically–“Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak.” You can look that up on YouTube if you want. It’s interesting, historically, but it’s not my cup of tea. I will always prefer to hear her use her own voice.

Ashevak’s talent in drawing came to the notice of Alma and James Houston–the couple who are mentioned as having started the first craft centre in Cape Dorset back in 1956. She worked on some sealskin designs, but Alma Houston soon encouraged her to try drawing. Then, men were mostly the ones who drew in the community, and Ashevak was the first woman to join them.

She began to gain prominence in the late 1960s, and she was awarded the Medal of Service of the Order of Canada in November 1967. By 2012, she was named to the Order of Nunavut, the territory’s greatest honour. That’s quite a set of ‘bookends’ to a vibrant and full career as an artist, to be sure, but her work…I think…is the real beauty.

I always say, when I write these reviews of exhibits at the AGS, that I’m not an art historian. It’s my attempt at a disclaimer. I just really love to be with (and in close proximity to) original art. I love beauty, and I cultivate it in how I curate my own home with art. (A childhood friend who lives in Montreal calls me a ‘voluptuary.’ For a while, I had trouble with accepting that definition…but then I thought about it some more…and I think I’m in there somehow. I like scents, tastes, colours, and touching textures and fabrics, so I guess that friend knows me more than I know myself. She’s watched me grope historic houses over the decades, too, so I’ll give her that. Maybe ‘voluptuary’ works.) All this is to say, my blogs about art exhibitions at the gallery are…more about how the art makes me feel than think about it in a critical or cerebral fashion. I just really want to slip into the art. That’s all…really…

Find yourself a seat when you go. My favourite place to sit is in the middle of Gallery 2. You need to book ahead for these visits because of Covid, but it’s kind of lovely to have a whole art gallery to yourself for an hour. It gives you the space to sit and think, to be with yourself, and to be with Ashevak’s beauty.

Take a look at her mystical women, with Wisdom of the Elders (2009), and Eternal Spirit (2011). Think about how those women are at the centre of things–as heartbeats, lighthouses, observers, caregivers, lovers, mothers, sisters, and daughters. She knew how to ‘speak’ about how the world was woven, and that’s what I love about her. I don’t have the fancy schmancy, super technical, academic art historian language to tell you why, but I can tell you that I feel it in my body–when I breathe, when I listen to my heartbeat, and when I root my feet down to the ground to stand tall and walk forward. Ashevak feels strong to me when I sit in the presence of her work. Powerful.

Wisdom of the Elders (2009), ink and coloured pencil

I am, though, as I’ve said, drawn to her birds most of all. That means the owls, of course, and the ravens. Black birds–crows, ravens, red-winged blackbirds, and my little magpies–have always entranced me. In Irish tradition, The Morrigan is a figure I’m drawn to. She’s transformative and mythic. The Morrigu, as she’s also sometimes called, is linked symbolically to war and battle, and can shapeshift into the form of a bird. She’s about endings and beginnings, about death and rebirth, about despair and hope. That’s what I like about her: she isn’t easily defined or boxed up or in. So. Put me amongst the birds, feathered or painted, out in the bush, and I’m a very happy woman.

Here are a few of my favourite pieces from the current AGS show:

Dancing Ravens (2003), ink and coloured pencil

Spectacular Ravens (2003), ink and coloured pencil

Owls Enveloped (2004), ink

Please don’t forget to see the fish in Gallery 1. I grew up fishing with my dad on the Narrows of Lake Nipissing, so I’m fond of fish drawings, too. Take my word for it: go right up to those three beautiful fish drawings to the left of the entrance of Gallery 1 and just choose one fish drawing. Go up to it. Lean in close (but don’t touch it because that’s not allowed and might be illegal!) and look right into the fish’s eye. Then, look over the body of your chosen fish. See how Kenojuak Ashevak has used the ink and coloured pencils to create the sense of scales. Look at the work. Closely. Carefully. Breathe it in. Close your eyes. Open them again. And look again….even more closely.

This exhibition, Kenojuak Ashevak–Life & Legacy, is on loan from the West Baffin Eskimo Co-Operative Limited, in Cape Dorset, Nunavut. We’re lucky to have it coming here to Greater Sudbury. It runs until the end of May. You just need to call the Gallery at 705-675-4871 to book your hour. You can visit with people who are in your immediate bubble. Bring your mask. Sanitize your hands. Do the covid stuff. To be honest, though, maybe go twice…because that’s what I’m going to do. Be sure to go once on your own…so you can sit with Ashevak and her beauty and breathe into it all. It’s soul stuff, this one, and it’s lovely…especially on a rainy day in March.

peace,

k.

(*You can buy a copy of a beautiful book that accompanies the exhibit, published by Pomegranate Press, so be sure to bring some pocket money. It’s $25 and well worth the investment if you love art.)

A love letter to Laurentian University…

There will be plenty of voices out there these days, and every single one will have a different opinion about what’s been happening to the university that most Sudburians have known for all of our lives. Now, there are some professors who have come and gone, just stopping by on their way through town, but there are also some who’ve decided to plant themselves and fashion lives here. For those of us who were born here…well…the university is the quiet heart of the community that we’ve maybe sometimes taken for granted. It’s an obvious landmark on the shore of Ramsey Lake. It’s been here since 1968, but not in the way we know or recognize now. I was born on November 29, 1970. Laurentian is two years older than me. Ancient, but not. Still young. Still evolving and changing….especially now.

I often spend mornings walking the boardwalk, and I love watching the sunrise…but I always look towards the silhouette of Laurentian…because…for me…it’s a poem and a painting.

If you’re a Sudburian, if you’re ‘basin born’ as I say in my hospital window poem, it’s likely you might have attended Laurentian University. A lot of Sudburians, and plenty of Northern Ontario folks–people who are proud members of the Laurentian University Alumni Association–have kids and grandkids who are now students there. The building itself has been part of my family’s landscape for decades. Two of my uncles, Peter Ennis and Jeno Tihanyi, were instrumental in bringing accolades and helping to build Laurentian’s reputation. I miss them terribly, and I’m proud of both of them in equal measure. I am proud to be their niece. I remember how much of their lives they gave up to their students, their programs, and to fighting passionately for whatever they thought would make Laurentian a better place in the earlier days. They didn’t think of it as a “just now” place to work, but they loved it fiercely. It was my uncle, Peter, who coined the term “Pride and Tradition.” I don’t know if it’s still painted on the wall of the gym in the Ben Avery Building, but it was when I spent a lot of time there, in my under-10s, teens, and 20s, watching his basketball games on Saturday nights from the bleachers.

So. I am going to tell you about my love story with Laurentian, and why I know we need to fight for it here in Sudbury and in the North. There are enough people taking the past and current administration to task, and there are definitely certain people who should be held accountable, but none of it seems very clear to me right now. That will come out as they investigate it all, I’m sure. I’ve read the media coverage carefully. I have. But, mostly, I’ve been grieving the news of what’s been happening, because it makes me angry. Someone on Twitter started speaking poorly of Sudbury and of Northern Ontario, blaming LU’s insolvency on how horrible it must be to live in this part of the world, which I find ridiculously ignorant. When I was Poet Laureate, I found myself constantly trying to tell people–while I was in other places at literary events and book launches around the country–that Sudbury was no longer the Sudbury of the moon landing story (which is so stale and overdone now, anyway, really). We have evolved. Thank goodness we haven’t stayed the same. We’ve grown…and that’s been difficult, too. It always is…isn’t it?

For just a bit here…I want to tell you why I love Laurentian University…and why I know we need to fight for it.

I grew up at Laurentian. I spent a lot of time watching my cousins at swim meets, and being transfixed by how worked up my uncle, Jeno, could get on the pool deck when he was coaching. I mostly was an overweight, bookish girl, so I always sat up in the gallery with a book…but I looked up to see what was going on. I never liked the smell of chlorine, and I didn’t like being in a bathing suit because I was always bullied as a kid for being overweight. Girls, in particular, can be really cruel to girls who are overweight. I know this from personal experience. Still, I did learn to swim there. How could I not? My uncle ran the pool. I did my various levels of swimming, so some of you will be old enough to remember the badges we got with each level. (Who really knows where you were supposed to ‘sew them on’? I’m still trying to figure out that one!) It’s the pool where I learned to dog paddle, flutter kick, and do a shitty front crawl. It is also where I was terrified when they made us go up to the first step on the diving tower. I have always been terrified of heights. I still am. (I freeze on castle battlements…and sometimes I freak out while on escalators if someone is too close to me…but that’s a whole other blog). That the Jeno Tihanyi Olympic Gold Pool has been closed for a lot of this year is more than frustrating, too. Again, I can imagine what my uncle would have had to say about that. He knew that physical activity was key to a good and rewarding life. It was part of balancing mind with body. Trust me when I tell you that he would not have minced his words. He was a feisty Hungarian-Canadian. (Still…he could tell the most fascinating stories of having to leave Hungary as a young man, and how he made his way here afterwards…and he had the best laugh…and was the consummate gentleman went it came to putting women’s coats on after family parties…and helping us up the Tihanyi driveway onto Ramsey Lake Road. I recall a number of times when he would say, when I was driving my first car in my 20s, “Kim…you want to go back a bit, and then get up some speed, and keep it steady…to get over that icy patch and then up the hill.” Most often, he would have to take my place in the car and I would trundle up the driveway…after he navigated the winter mess. That hill…was a winter nightmare.)

My uncle, Jeno, with Sasa (Alex) Baumann, who won a gold medal at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

It was so amazing to see the pool named after Jeno. Here’s my aunt, Cathy Tihanyi (my mum’s sister) and Sasa Baumann.

The fondest memories I have of the Ben Avery, though, is of hanging out with my sister, Stacy, and my cousins, Liam and Kelly, and Miklos, Sacha, and Andrey at basketball games. Liam and I were the oldest…but the crew of us just tumbled around the Ben Avery like real tumbleweeds on Saturday nights when we were younger. I remember games of hide and seek, and of running races up and down the hallways outside my uncles’ office doors. We razzed our respective parents for change, so that we could stock up on chips, chocolate, and pop from the vending machines in the basement at halftime. In our teens and 20s, we were all much better behaved, thank God. (We were likely just trying to look cooler…but were still wild inside…and some of us had weird asymmetrical haircuts.)

I remember watching Peter’s basketball games more carefully then. Mostly…I can remember the love and passion that Peter brought to every game. I was so proud to have him as my uncle. (This was the same guy who used to steal pickles and black olives from Gram’s dinner table and then shush me because he didn’t want Gram Ennis catching him snacking.) Saturday nights were fast suppers at home, and Mum and Dad would bundle us into the van. I remember Gram Ennis being at the games and she was–I think–one of her son’s biggest fans. If you sat next to her in the bleachers, you could watch her eyes anxiously follow the girls up and down the court. She would yell out with the rest of us. My great aunts would sometimes come, too, especially when it got to playoffs. See…we all loved Peter a lot…and we loved seeing the Lady Vees do well. We all sat together. We all shouted “DEFENCE! DEFENCE!” and clapped and cheered at the right parts of the game. We were a big Irish family. We weren’t quiet…then. I miss those days…for all of those people who were there then, and who aren’t now.

When Peter got sick with cancer, he kept coaching. He took Team Canada to the Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. He did that when he was very, very ill. He chose to live right until the end of his life, and he was the person who taught me the most about how to live life fully. Funny how you wish you could tell someone that, but then they’ve gone and you can’t. But he did that for me. And I miss him a lot. More than I can say, actually…but that’s a whole other blog, too…where I could just tell you why I loved Pete so much. So many reasons. He was the kindest, funniest, most compassionate, and warmest of uncles. (This is not to disparage my other uncles…it’s just that Peter was a bit of magic…and if you knew him, you know exactly what I mean…and there’s sometimes no way to explain why a person is just so special. You just know they’re magic, right? He was that kind of a lighthouse. You can see it here…in the joy he had when he won a game. He was happy for his players, for his coaches, for his family, and for Laurentian University. This photograph, to me, is the epitome of what passion…and joy…is about. I’m still so proud of him….)

Both of my uncles gave their lives to Laurentian. Both worked there up until they were very ill with cancer. They were passionate, in different ways, and they lived their sports. When I heard the news about Laurentian, I cried. I did. You see, these two men gave so much of themselves to help build it. And they are just two of hundreds of professors and coaches who built it up from a tiny Northern university to a world respected institution. So many people…so many Northerners…have given their lives to this university.

Now. For me…I have much to thank Laurentian for…so where to begin:

It was where I met my first boyfriend. I was a late bloomer. I lost some weight in first year and then I started to feel better about myself. I met that boy at the Art Gallery of Sudbury in third year. He was in the French section of an Art History class, and I was in the English section. Dr. Henry Best taught both of them. They were separate classes, held on different days and at different times. We met on a field trip to the Art Gallery. I was sneaky. I thought he was funny and cute…and so, after he left, I went back a few days later to see if I could find his name in the guest book. I found it. I had a bit of a crush. Then, there was a field trip to Toronto, to see the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Gardiner Museum, and–on the way home, the place I would come to love for life–the McMichael Gallery in Kleinberg. That first boyfriend…well…we spent a lot of time together on that Toronto trip…talking and laughing. By the time we got home to Sudbury a few days later, I was smitten. That relationship didn’t last, but it was Laurentian that brought me my first love. For a poet, that’s a big deal. A really big deal.

There were a couple of others I fancied, over my time there as an undergrad, but I won’t mention them here…because I’m sure they still live in Sudbury. The one who ended up knowing me best was a varsity swimmer on my uncle’s swim team, whom I met when I had a Celtic music show at CKLU in my late 20s. That’s a whole other blog…that one…but suffice it to say that you need to mind young men who are tall, handsome, athletic, and who come from Nova Scotia. They’re…a lot…for a poet in her 20s. Falling in love with men who don’t mind taking spontaneous road trips with me to other cities (and provinces!)…is a problem I’ve had my whole life. If they’re willing to let me drive wherever I want to go…at the drop of a hat…in the dead of night…well…Jesus…Laurentian has afforded me those magical memories, too. Some of them are poems in books…

What I am most grateful for, though, is the English Department. I want to thank a few of those English professors, including Laurie Steven, Marilyn Orr, Tom Gerry, and Shannon Hengen, who were the most formative people for me, as a blossoming young poet. It was in Laurie’s 3rd year Modern Poetry class that I started to fall for the modern poets. What? I had studied very little poetry in high school, which is something I try to remedy in my work as a high school English teacher now. I came to love Shakespeare most deeply at Laurentian. That’s also where I met William Butler Yeats in an intense way, along with Seamus Heaney. I would end up writing my undergrad thesis on Yeats’s faery poems, and the Irish Renaissance. Then, I’d move along to Carleton University in Ottawa to do my Master’s thesis on the bog poems of Seamus Heaney, in relation to The Troubles. I threw a bit of art into that MA thesis, too, so I figure I’ve always been a bit ekphrastic. I can thank Laurentian for that, too…because when I was back in Dr. Best’s class, I volunteered at the Laurentian University Museum and Art Centre (LUMAC). It would become The Art Gallery of Sudbury (AGS) later, when I worked there for a while back in 1997. So, you see…I can thank Laurentian for my love of English, of poetry, of art, and of late Friday night poetry readings in what was the ‘new’ student centre in the 1990s. I still remember the night we all gathered in that new lounge to watch the Quebec Referendum results roll in. I mean…that was historic…for the time.

People will be casting stones now about what’s happened…but I think it’s important to remember why a place like Laurentian University is important to you, if you’re a graduate. Ask yourself what it’s given to you, and what you’ve given back to it. For me, it’s been an anchor through a life that’s been challenging, to say the least. It gave me the words I hold so dear. Those words have carried me through depression…and a lot of loss. Those words…that grounding in literature…came from Laurentian. I’m never really lonely because I have my words…and the gift of writing was honed at Laurentian. It is, for me, the dearest place…

My undergrad degree gave me the grounding in English to go on and publish my first little chapbook, You Must Imagine The Cold Here, with Laurie Steven’s Your Scrivener Press, back in March 1997. We had that book launch at the Art Gallery, and we had an Irish band and a bit of ceili dancing. Mrs. Bell’s ghost was pleased, I think. When I was at Carleton University, in 1994-95, I met John Flood, who taught a course in how to research properly at the graduate level. He also was the publisher of Penumbra Press, which published my next two books, braille on water (2001) and The Narcoleptic Madonna (2012). I would end up publishing Some Other Sky (Black Moss Press, 2017), after I became Poet Laureate and met Marty Gervais in Windsor while reading at Poetry at the Manor. He knew I had a manuscript ready and asked to see it. All of this publishing stuff swirled through my life, and I’m sure that–from a distance–from the outside looking in, it looked as if I hadn’t worked very hard at all. But…my writing has always been my passion. I love words. I’m 50 now, and I’ve not stopped writing–in a really serious, focused way–since my early 20s. Guess where I was when that started? Sitting in those old lecture halls at Laurentian and lugging around a massive 4th year textbook of Literary Criticism essays…and sitting cross-legged between the stacks where the Irish lit books live…and soaking up Frankenstein, and To The Lighthouse, and The Mill on the Floss in a new way.

Too, my ability to work on strengthening my writing meant that I got to work with Timothy Findley through the Humber School for Writers in the late 1990s, as an emerging writer. He was, for me, the first person who encouraged me to consider myself as a writer–of prose, and not just poetry. Lawrence Hill, too, deserves much gratitude for telling me, at Sage Hill Writing Experience in the summer of 2014, over a conversation in the lounge at St. Michael’s over a cup of coffee, that I was maybe needing to think of myself as more of a writer than “just a poet.” I had told him I had an idea for a novel, but was “just a poet.” He shook his head. That conversation changed me again. He told me that I should write the novel I had in my head and heart..and so I did. I wouldn’t have met either of these amazing mentors if I hadn’t had that LU undergrad English experience. Beyond that, I’ve worked with brilliant writers as mentors: John Glenday, Jen Hadfield, Ken Babstock, Susan Rich, and Marnie Woodrow are just a few who have taught me important things about my work as a thinker and writer. Plus, I had an encounter with Margaret Atwood at a writing retreat in May 2016 that was formative for me, in terms of how I view myself as a writer, and as a Northern writer in particular. We learn lessons…all the time. Some are more difficult than others…but all of them teach us new things about ourselves…and we grow.

In the 1990s, I sat on the Alumni Association Board, and I met some friends there. Some of them have drifted, as old friends will, but all of them are doing well, and contributing to this community in really tangible and vibrant ways. We grew up there, at Laurentian. We found our feet there, and we found our voices there, too. We were so young…then…

The thing I think we sometimes forget, if we’ve lived in Sudbury all of our lives, is that this university of ours was hard fought for, and it is something to be proud of, despite this recent mess. That a small group of people have done this makes me furious inside. Laurentian is all about what my uncle termed ‘Pride and Tradition.’ It still is. We need to remind ourselves of what good it’s brought this town, this region, this northern part of the province. So much of the beauty we’ve enjoyed during the pandemic, on the hiking trails, is about the re-greening programs that started through LU in the 1970s. Think of the work done by the scientists and researchers who work at the university, and of the significance of the Living with Lakes Centre to environmental reclamation and protection of plants, animals, and insects. Think of the fact that Laurentian has a literary journal to be proud of, in Sulphur. Think of the medical school and the school of architecture. Think of the importance of how those programs have grown. Think of how much Laurentian has grown since the 90s, and of how Sudbury itself has blossomed because Laurentian blossomed first. Sudbury just wouldn’t be what it is today without Laurentian.

This doesn’t solve anything right now. I know that. It doesn’t make it less stressful for anyone who works at Laurentian right now, whether they are librarians, or professors, or security guards. That is the hardest part of this thing–the human part. Sometimes things fall apart…and there is great sadness in that. The city is grieving what’s been happening since the news came out a few weeks ago. I think sometimes towers fall…so that things can evolve. Maybe I’m an eternal optimist, as a poet…but I do think that there are always beginnings to be found in endings. It may not feel like it when everything is crumbling all around you, but things remake themselves (just as people do throughout their lives) in sometimes interesting ways. I’m hopeful that that will be the case with Laurentian. I believe it will be. Nothing is meant to say the same, and I don’t think it could have gone on the way it was going really, when research grants were being funnelled into operating costs. That’s just wrong, and I am sure there are many professors who feel deep betrayal about that. How could they not? They’re only human. They work hard and their work is valuable. To be so sideswiped, in such a strange fashion, is horrific. There is no doubt about it. Still, there’s a quote I love that is attributed to Buddha. “Everything changes. Nothing remains without change.” That quote, to be honest, in my life…which has been full of great loss…gives me a place to be still, to find an anchor. I return to it often…in good times and in bad ones…and always in times of personal transformation and growth.

The question is…what will the change bring us here in Sudbury? And how will we adapt to it? We don’t have to like it…because who likes things that make them uncomfortable? No one. Let’s be honest. But…we grow the most, maybe, when things change. We learn new things about ourselves, and about what’s important. We strip down to our necessities, to what is most important. I know what’s important about Laurentian–it’s the people, not the fancy buildings, and it’s the passion for asking questions and going out to search for answers, and it’s the excitement about curiosity, learning, and the exploration of ideas. And…it’s about being a lighthouse for Sudbury and for the Northeast.

I am very sad about what’s happening. I’m very angry, too. But I also want to say that I love Laurentian, and that it’s part of who I am today. This 50 year old poet woman would be a very different person if she hadn’t met that first boyfriend through that art history class. She might not have started writing plays if she hadn’t seen a number of really great plays at Thorneloe in her early 30s. She might not be hefting kettlebells and swimming in northern lakes if she hadn’t grown up running races down the hallways of the Ben Avery. I don’t know. I only know that I want us to try to remember why Laurentian is important to us, how it’s formed us as people, as Sudburians….and just as humans. And I want us to be thinking of the people who are so caught up in all of this right now, and how betrayed and angry they must be feeling. But they still love Laurentian…as we all do. We can be angry at a group of people who did this. We should be. That they mishandled the affairs of a place we hold dear, as Sudburians, is inexcusable really. You can’t apologize for that…neglect of care and duty. You can’t.

There is a pride and tradition that we can carry on with here, though, despite the darkness that’s around it all right now. We can offer Laurentian that, at the very least…and perhaps…by telling our stories, by writing our love letters to a university that raised us and holds us still in its heart, we’ll remind ourselves of why we need to fight for it.

Things might fall apart…and change…but we can still have pride and move forward. What other choice is there? We survive. We’re Northerners. And…I know my uncles wouldn’t give up on Laurentian…if they were still here. They’d likely be pissed off and very vocal…but they would fight for it, too. Because it’s worth it. Always has been…always will be.

peace, friends.

k.

Of whales, icebergs, and mental health…

I love whales. I love whales almost as much as I love icebergs. Both are things you don’t see often, if you live in Northern Ontario. Two springs ago, when I was in Newfoundland launching my last book of poems, These Wings, I saw icebergs for the first time in my life. It was a VERY. BIG. DEAL. I wept because it was the first time in my life that I felt very, very small, in the face of the beauty of the natural world. The Atlantic Ocean does that to me. If you put me next to the Atlantic Ocean, I’m a different woman. I’m already naturally tempestuous inside, as a poet, but being next to the Atlantic (either in Newfoundland or in Ireland), I’m a sort of walk-between-worlds kind of woman.  

One day after I arrived in St. John’s in May 2018, I went out on the ocean with my friend Monica Kidd, a writer and physician, on a boat tour of the Witless Bay Ecological Reserve. (That it’s a boat tour company that’s owned by The O’Briens of Irish Descendants fame also put me over the edge that day, but that’s a whole other story. The Irish Canadians who sing and dance at ceilis will understand my excitement. That’s all that matters here.) Mon knows I love puffins, so she knew I’d see them. Before she was a doctor, she was a CBC reporter and a marine biologist, so she knows her puffins. We parked the car in the lot at Bay Bulls, paid the tickets, and went on the boat tour. 

There weren’t any whales in May 2018 for me. The Universe had other plans. I reconnected with my puffins, at Witless Bay and in Elliston, but that trip east was all about icebergs instead. Why? I find them fascinating. I’m no fancy, super smart scientist. I failed science. Well, maybe not failed, but I did blow up a beaker over a Bunsen burner in one class. Mrs. Way once nearly got hit by a rubber stopper from a beaker because I overheated my beaker over a burner flame and the thing shot off and hit the chalkboard right next to her. I was in the first row of lab tables. I’ll never forget her turning around with a look of surprise on her face. She had a poet in the class. Poor woman. 

I love whales, the ones I’ve never seen but still know that exist, because I believe in them, even if I don’t see them. In many cultures, they are sacred. In terms of cosmogenic symbolism, whales are in a number of ancient sacred texts and are embedded in the stories of cultures around the world. Often, the whale-spirit is the one that helps to carry souls from place to place, from here to there, from this life to the next. The whale is also associated with compassion and solitude, having knowledge of both life and death. They are also associated with creativity, with how it sort of bursts out of creative people with the force of water being blown out of a blowhole. Yup. Know that one. Besides all of this, though, whales intrigue me because they’re ‘underneath.’ People who’ve read my work, in all genres, will know I am fascinated by what is projected on the surface of things (often illusion) and the underlying truths of the ‘underneath.’ Perhaps that is why I love the notion of whales. The same can be said of icebergs. Only a very small bit of an iceberg is above the surface. It can be massive, an iceberg, and my laptop’s screen saver is of an iceberg that calved in front of me that day in Witless Bay. The captain of the boat heard a rumble, turned the boat to go towards a nearby berg, and then we watched as—before our eyes—the iceberg calved. You haven’t lived, I don’t think, until you’ve seen an iceberg calve. The result is a new sort of iceberg, one that’s been broken and has a new form, with pieces of itself left on the surface of the sea. After the rumble, after the rush of ice, I kept thinking about what’s left behind after the destruction and reshaping…

How is this blog about mental health, then? If you’ve read this far, you should receive a treat or something. It’s about to get less poetic and a little bit more rough watered. Tempestuous? Maybe, if you don’t like hearing the perspective of someone who nearly killed herself back in 2008. Woah. That’s a sentence that holds its intensity like a bomb, eh? I don’t think I’ve ever written that down so blatantly before, but I’ve calved, like an iceberg, and I’ve changed form. There’s some scientific equation for this, but I don’t remember it…

I have a problem with Bell Let’s Talk Day. I avoid social media. I might post something, but I won’t look around. I’ve learned that looking around on social media just triggers me. I want to yell out “No! You can’t know!” to the people at the big institutions (like companies, like politicians and city halls, like universities and colleges, like hospitals, like churches, like school boards) and famous people and Instagram Influencers and those who Tweet out their “Reach out and chat with us. Here’s the EAP phone number! Here’s the Student Support Line! Here’s the person in HR who will save you and keep you working, even if you’re barely holding yourself together at work!” I want to shout out at the hypocrisy of it all, even knowing that on this particular day, my voice won’t be heard, and may be ignored or cast off. I know that my voice, that of a mental health survivor, won’t matter as much as the social and political optics that make OTHER people feel better. It doesn’t make this survivor feel better. I won’t say that I speak for all mental health survivors, because I know I don’t. To be that self-centred would make me throw up in my own mouth. What bothers me is the scope of how corporate branding and marketing has swept through mental health awareness in Canada over the last decade. Yes, it’s raised awareness, but I honestly believe it’s also done damage to those who have suffered and survived, and to those who now suffer and struggle desperately to survive. 

When I was at my sickest, in December 2008, I had been caring for my mother for about eight months. She was bed ridden in our home, with a transmetatarsal amputation of her right foot. I cooked for her, emptied her commode, bathed her (badly, I’m sure she thought) in the walk-in tub that my father had installed after she had her amputation, and changed her bed when she was sick. I lived with them, and she was completely dependent upon me for all care. My father had health issues, so he was not physically well enough to lift her, from bed to commode and back. I did that. I shouldn’t have, but I did. The nurse would visit twice a day to debride her foot, and my dad would sit and hold her hand during those very dark days before she was admitted to hospital in mid-December. As the two people who lived with her as she went through the last year of her life, we did our best, and my sister helped from the outside in, advocating for her when I was too weak to manage in April of that year. Stacy was the one who gave the doctors at Memorial shit one morning when we were there with Mum for her debriding. Her ankle didn’t have a pulse. (Did you know that doctors check your pulse there, when you have gangrene? I didn’t. I learned a lot about gangrene and debriding that year. Ask me. I know a lot about gangrene and amputation. I still do.) When the doctor tipped up Mum’s foot, you could see the blood rush one way, and then her leg whitened to a colour I’ll never forget. The blood wasn’t circulating properly. Thing is, with gangrene, there’s a place where it starts to climb up your leg, like a tide mark, and then the end is near. There’s an actual fucking line that you can watch climb the leg of someone you love. It’s something I won’t forget until the day I die, I don’t think. That was the morning that they decided to amputate part of her foot, in April of 2008. At the time, I was in the thick of major depressive disorder, one that my psychiatrist referred to as ‘situational depression.’ 

At the end of a long day of cleaning, cooking, and being off work from teaching with depression from January 2008 onwards, I would take the dogs out for walks. It was the only time I could get out. I usually timed it with the evening nurse’s visit. You wouldn’t think that a walk with dogs would be suicidal. It was. It nearly was. We lived in Minnow Lake, and Bancroft Drive is a fast road. It’s a fast road. The cars speed through at breakneck speed. They don’t care. They never have. They likely still don’t. In the 1970s, when I was growing up, we’d cross that road to go to the Crossan house, where Frances and Sheena lived. The four of us were explorers. Even then, the road was too fast. It wasn’t a suburb. It was a thoroughfare. So, at least once a day, I would walk the dogs. I would cross Bancroft and walk Gull and Sable for an hour. Down to Minnow Lake, past the weird fountain, past the little red brick church where—in Grade 3 or 4—I thought Jesus was actually going to come and talk to me in the confession booth during First Confession and tell me that I was a BIG sinner. (At that point, I thought it would either be Jesus, or God in a robe, or maybe Jesus-in-the-shape-of-a-lamb because I had a big imagination as a little girl). 

So, at least once a day, I would stand there at the curb, a dog leash in each hand, and think about stepping in front of a really big truck. I would watch for them. Every. Single. Day. For most of those five months after Mum came home from her amputation surgery. The only thing that stopped me from doing this, every single day, was having the dogs, and the notion that—if I erased myself physically—the dogs would die, and my parents would not have the care they needed. And they wouldn’t have because home care sucks, and it still does now, even thirteen years later. And because our society disregards the elderly as if they are to be cast off. One need only look to the demographics of deaths in this pandemic to see that that is true. Numbers and numbers and numbers…and so many of them in Long Term Care homes. Numbers are actually people, though, so I wonder how many of us remember that when we complain of what we must do now, to think less of ourselves and more of others we won’t even have met. 

I can’t stand to hear people complain about what’s happening with lockdowns when I know how many elderly people have died. We wouldn’t be here, in our cities and towns, without their hard work. Someday soon, too, we will also be in nursing homes, whether we want to believe that or not. This is not an ‘eternally young and sexy’ lifetime, despite the numbers of people who will sculpt their bodies with plastic surgery and excessive exercise. All of that will fade. All of that surface and superficial stuff…is irrelevant. Enjoy the illusion while you have it. It’s a comforting one, maybe…but it’s illusory. 

Other suicidal ideations came, too. I took long drives out to the highways, became fixated on rock cuts and waterways. Figured I could become Ophelia or pancake myself against hard rock. These were the notions. This is what suicidal ideation is about. It is not poetic. It is not fucking pretty. Not in the least bit. 

What bothers me most about corporate branding and marketing—for people and companies—is how fake it all seems. A playwright I follow on Twitter, Rona Altrows, said it best yesterday in a Tweet: “I wish this mental-health-day thing did not seem so commercial rah-rah Bell to me. Celebrity driven and somehow superficial for those of us who have truly suffered.” Yes. That. Let’s talk about that. Instead. Let’s not post rah-rah videos once a year. Let’s not post “Reach out to me if you need help” because most people who suffer will not be able to reach out when they are in the depths of despair. Stigma presses down too heavily.

So. The institutions that so easily speak up on such a day are the very ones that continue to propogate stigma in small, quiet ways. Try, if you’re a survivor of mental health issues, to move forward or ‘up’ in your company after you’ve taken time off on a sick leave. Try. Good luck to you. You can take all of the courses you want. You can have been discharged from care of a psychiatrist. You can have a vibrant and full life, but you will still be black balled. People will say ‘no, no, of course not’ but there will always be a shadow hovering behind you. Too, you will find it in your own group of acquaintances. When you’ve been sick, and when you’ve come out and reshaped yourself as a different person, you’ll lose people. They disappear. It’s from no fault of your own, and it’s from no fault of theirs. People grow. People change. They drift apart…like waves out on Witless Bay…that never come together. 

When I was discharged by my psychiatrist in April 2016, I sat in his tiny office, after eight years of regular visits, and he said to me: “Kim, it will not be easy. You will lose people. You will say ‘no’ when you have always said ‘yes’ and people will say ‘Oh, she’s unwell again…’ but you won’t be…and you must remember this.” He was right. People have disappeared, or drifted, and it’s not that it’s anyone’s fault. Life is full of ebbs and flows. Some people would rather a constant in a friend or lover. I’m not that. I’m a sea inside. That notion of constancy is an illusion, too, because why would you want to be the same person forever? Why would you not want to grow and change as a person, even if it means leaving others to walk a different path in life for a while, or forever? Things aren’t meant to last forever…

My psychiatrist was right. That last day, I remember saying to him, with tears in my eyes: “I don’t know how to do this now.” I remember him nodding. “Remember when you couldn’t look at me? You only looked to the floor? You were very, very ill. You are not now. There will be times, going forward, where you will speak your truth—as your new self—or you will speak about your feelings or emotions—in this new healthier person—and people will think ‘Ah, she is ill, she is fragile, she is unstable’ but you will not be. You will hit your difficult month of December, when everything is darker because of loss, and you will lose people every so often because they will not understand its weight on your heart. That’s okay. You will be well. It will be hard. And, those people who go…maybe they aren’t meant to walk with you for long anyway.” 

Here’s what I don’t like, as a survivor: I don’t like people who call me ‘fragile’ or ‘unstable’ or ‘weak.’ I’m the exact opposite. I’m strong. I’m a survivor. I’m still here. Here’s what I don’t like: I don’t like people who have never almost killed themselves creating a message that is made corporate and all Instagram-branded bullshit. Here’s what I don’t like: I don’t like large institutions saying they support mental health because they have an EAP number posted up in a staff lunchroom or bathroom. I don’t like celebrity testimonials, on the Internet, or on posters around a workplace. Because, you see, when you’re in the thick of it, people disappear…because they don’t understand the intensity of it all, and then you might think you are ‘less than’ because you can’t reach out. For those who struggle now, still, that’s a damning thing. It’s like a struggling swimmer seeing people leaning out of boats, their hands extended, offering trite words like “Reach out. Speak to me. I’m here” when they really aren’t…when the chips are down. It just isn’t that easy, you see. It just isn’t.    

I likely ought not to post this today, but I will because I have to. If you don’t agree, that’s fine. I’d rather not argue. Until you’ve been inside a body where you can’t handle being inside that body because of what storms inside your mind, at your sickest, then you likely won’t understand…and to be honest, I’m glad for you if that’s the case. I wouldn’t wish that experience on my worst enemy. You can have someone you love–a mother, brother, sister, father, aunt, lover–be struggling with mental health, and you can know that they suffer, and that it will and likely does affect you in a ripple effect kind of way, but if you think about that pain that you know, as a bystander, as a witness, you need to consider tripling that for the person who is walking through it.

Let’s Talk Day does work for raising awareness. I’ll give it that. But…I have so many worries about its overall glossy look. It really isn’t that glossy when you’re in the pit of despair. I worry for those who have suffered deeply, because it can be triggering to see it all on this day once a year, and maybe you won’t understand this if you haven’t suffered, and that’s okay too. It might make other people feel better, but I’m guessing there are more people like me out there…the ones who dread it every year because it seems to offer a ‘fix all’ solution…when it really can’t. I may be in a minority, but I don’t think so. I think a lot of us don’t speak up, for fear of the stigma, and for fear of using our voices when our history with mental illness has taught us that safety lies in silence. I don’t know. It will be different for each person.

My friend Robyn Scott lives in Yellowknife. I met her when I was a featured author at the Northwords Literary Festival in May 2018. She’s a teacher and a writer and an artist. She’s a triple threat. She’s also just a really amazing person. She’s begun a series of ‘balloon animals’ and I bought one that arrived in the mail last week. It’s the image that accompanies this blog entry. It’s a whale, lifted up by a balloon. That’s how I feel. What’s within and what I carry can be heavy, my past history with major depressive disorder, but it’s also everything that makes me a healthier me now: it’s a rough past with mental health issues, and it’s a deep reserve and well of creativity and wonder, and a deep passion for living spontaneously and with intense curiosity. And it’s a gathering of life experiences–at 50 now!–that make me a dynamic and interesting woman. I’m cool with all of this. I’m proud of all of this. It’s why I do public work on advocating for art, writing, and mental health.

I’m a whale, and I’m an iceberg. And I’m a poem and a painting. That’s what makes me interesting as a human, I think.

I’m still here. And that’s a miracle…and a celebration…and a lesson in living for me. Each day is a gift, no matter who is walking with me, and no matter who has disappeared…because I’m still here. And I’m not fragile, so don’t ever say that word around me.

And I’m not going anywhere anytime soon…and that’s a promise…or a threat… 🙂

peace, friends.

k.

p.s. if you like Robyn’s whale, you can order prints of various balloon animals on her website and look under ‘Whimsy.’ There are links there to her social media feeds. You should follow her on Instagram, too. 🙂

https://www.robynscott.ca

A visit to the Franklin Carmichael exhibit at The Art Gallery of Sudbury…

There’s a photo of Franklin Carmichael that I just really, really love. In it, he’s seated on a camp stool, in front of a paint box that is opened and there is a little canvas propped up in front of him.

It’s all black and white, and I have a thing for black and white photos. I always have. The more famous one is this one, though…with Carmichael as a strange, hooded figure, looking out over the LaCloche Mountains, a place he loved. (I’ve hiked there with my friend, Jen Geddes…and had my breath stolen by the beauty from the highest point…so I can imagine why he was drawn to these Northern Ontario views. Who wouldn’t be?)

Black and white photos make me wonder what people were thinking when the photo was taken. I start to imagine stories…and then I’m off in my head and imagination. This particular photo show Carmichael just looking at what he’s painted, assessing it, I imagine. I do this, as a poet. I write something, then read it out loud to the dog (who never listens), and then think “Oh, this is rubbish…I should start over” or “Okay, maybe this is the start of something…if I am patient enough to sit with it and not rush it through and out…” I imagine that Franklin Carmichael must have done the same thing as a painter, though one can never be sure of what another person is thinking…or might have thought. He’s been dead a while now. 

Carmichael was born in 1890 and died in 1945. He’s one of the Group of Seven, that famous Canadian group of (mostly) men. (I always kind of think of Emily Carr as above and beyond them, somehow, but I’m biased.) When I stand in front of an Emily Carr or a Tom Thomson, I’ll just start to cry. I’m an embarrassment in art galleries like the Art Gallery of Ontario, the McMichael Collection, and the National Gallery of Canada. It’s likely why I almost always go alone…because no one needs to see me cry. I’m all blue eyes and sea inside…and then it’s just a mess. Art, though…if it moves me….makes me cry. 

This is all to say that, while I like Carmichael, I’m more in love with Tom Thomson. There are a whole raft of reasons for this distinction, but that would be another blog. The two men did share a studio back in 1914, and they often painted with some of the other members of the Group of Seven. But…back to Carmichael. 

He’s known mostly for painting in watercolours, but also sometimes used oil paints, to capture the raw beauty of the Canadian landscape. (My Art History professor at Laurentian University, the late Dr. Henry Best, would be pleased to know I listened in his lectures…but he might not have been as happy to know that when he asked the class over to his house one day to see his many original works of Canadian art…that I might have surreptitiously touched the frame of an Emily Carr when no one else in the class was looking. People who know me know that I touch things…so…that was a fated Carr encounter in some professor’s upstairs hallway on the way to a fake bathroom break…just so I could grope the frame.)

In the mid-late 1920s, Carmichael fell in love with Lake Superior when he went there to paint, alongside Lawren Harris (I also love his work!) and Arthur Lismer (he’s okay…but he’s not my fella…) Carmichael came to northern Ontario, to our part of the world, in 1930, exploring the industry of mining within the landscape. The Cobalt-based sketches upstairs in the AGS exhibit are really beautiful and feel like home to me. These are places I remember my dad driving us through, when he was a beer rep for Labatt’s when we were in our earlier teens. We drove through places like Cobalt and New Liskeard and Kirkland Lake, and I remember it all quite clearly. I see in photographs and images…and then they become poems.

The exhibit that’s currently on at the Art Gallery of Sudbury, Franklin Carmichael:  An Artist’s Process, is really fascinating because it looks at how Carmichael created his work. There are really ‘naked’ and rough sketches, done in pencil and on rough paper, and they seem almost child-like at first. There are notions of hills and mine head frames that are etched out. However, as you make your way through the exhibit, with a skilled guide who lets you know the story of the pieces, you learn that these were beginning sketches, studies, the very places where Carmichael began to work out his more developed pieces.

To be honest, when I saw the roughest sketches, and then moved on to the more finished pieces, I kept thinking of W. B. Yeats. I remember studying his various poems in a fourth year seminar class with Dr. Laurie Steven at Laurentian in the early 1990s. We looked at his revision process. If you study Yeats, you’ll know he kept each draft of a poem, from start to finish. He was meticulous. Carmichael reminded me of Yeats. Both seemed to value the creative process, knowing that the tiny steps they took, with each and every piece, would lead them to a richer final piece. This artistic work takes time. And patience. Both men–artists in different disciplines–would take their time, be meticulous in their work as creatives, and be brutal in their respective edits. I admire that in an artist. A lot. People always think to seem, if they aren’t writers, that poems just magically appear…or that paintings appear just as magically…but they haven’t any idea of the time and effort it actually takes to do this work.

Normally, I would take a foot selfie with the art pieces clearly visible, but you aren’t allowed to take photos in this exhibit. You also need to have a guide with you while you tour the galleries. So, for this photo, you get the bottom of Carmichael’s work. To see the amazing pieces, you need to go to the Art Gallery of Sudbury.

Because I couldn’t take photos of the pieces, and because so many are untitled, I just want to say that if you read this blog post, it’s really worth it to go and see this exhibit. Afterwards, it’s slated to move to the Art Gallery of Algoma in Sault Ste. Marie. You don’t, though, want to miss it. Of particular note are the pieces, I think, that seem to centre on Cobalt. These are pieces that remind me of old photos of Creighton and Sudbury, too. My grandmother’s family, my great-aunts of Irish descent, often showed me old photos of Creighton. There was my great-grandfather’s General Store and post office, and here, too, in one piece today, was a general store of the very same ilk. And, as well, outside that image, was the likeness of an old wooden sidewalk. I clearly remember my grandmother and my great aunts telling me stories of the old wooden sidewalks that lined the streets in Creighton. Looking at that photo this afternoon made me think of my mother’s family’s history…and of all the stories they told me. Life here, in Northern Ontario, wasn’t easy. It might be simple to think you could romanticize it, but that would be a mistake. That settlers to Northern Ontario struggled goes without a doubt in my mind.

The other thing that struck me this afternoon was that Carmichael was so beautifully influenced by the work of Lawren Harris. I love Harris, too. Always have. His are the paintings of big Lake Superior skies and islands, with clouds that sometimes look like wild birds winging through space. There are two or three paintings in this AGS exhibit that made me think “Oh, that’s so like Harris!” It makes sense. They traveled together up to Superior in the mid-1920s. Harris impressed Carmichael, they were friends and colleagues, and so Carmichael mimicked his style. Poets do this, too, just as I am influenced by Mary Oliver and Seamus Heaney. I could never expect to be as good as they are, as a poet, but I am well and truly influenced by their work. Better to be honest than not, as a creative. (Really, let’s be honest, though: who wouldn’t be impressed by Harris?!) So. if you want to see the piece that makes me catch my breath, it’s the one in Gallery 1, just as you enter and to the right. You’ll know it: it’ll look like a Lawren Harris piece, but it’s a Carmichael, and it’s blue and full of spirit. That one. Go see it.

Really, I could try and wow you here with borrowed art history information, but I only just have one art history course from Laurentian that’s over twenty-five years old now. So I won’t. I’ll tell you instead, here, that I really love the Art Gallery of Sudbury. It’s played a role in my life, for all of my life. I fell in love there for the first time. He was in the French section of the art history course, and I was in the English one. (That’s a poem, and not a poem that ended happily, but it’s still a poem, somehow.) I volunteered there when I was in that art history class, and stayed for a few years, without pay, shelving borrowed art books and tiny projector slides. You see, that’s where I fell in love with Canadian art. I studied it in stolen moments, in between volunteer tasks like sending membership renewals and licking stamps and sealing envelopes. It’s also the place where I learned about patience, and how to be studious, and how to be still inside when I encounter art. I owe the AGS a great debt of gratitude. No one else will ever understand that.

Today, after a few issues with my physical health this fall, and feeling frustrated with not being able to ‘feel better’ as quickly as I usually do, it felt safe–like coming home, somehow–to be amidst those walls and pieces from the Permanent Collection. In Gallery 3, I smiled at the walls of old books. Here were the ones I’d shelved in my early to mid-20s, across the street in the old B.A. McDonald House. Now…well…now it’s just a regular house, but then, it was a really special place where a few people who loved art worked every day…

I could write here about all of the beautiful paintings, but I really just want to say that, if you live in Greater Sudbury, and if you’re craving a quiet place where you can just be still, you should schedule a visit to see this Franklin Carmichael exhibit at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. It runs until the 31st of December, so you still have time. It’s so ‘in demand,’ though, that you need to book a week in advance. I’m in my own bubble, so I always have the pleasure of being completely on my own with Tadd, who is a really smart gallery guide. It kind of feels, I guess, like how it would be to have a boutique experience with art. I suppose that’s one way of explaining it. Imagine being given free reign to be with art on your own. It’s sort of like my lifetime dream of being locked in a bookstore or library overnight. I should clarify by saying that I wouldn’t want to be in a ‘regular’ library overnight. I’m more the woman who would want to be locked into the library in Dublin with the Book of Kells…with the ability to actually turn the damn pages at 3:23am on a Saturday. That’s me. Or, maybe, a night locked into Marsh’s Library in Dublin, just round the corner from St. Patrick’s Cathedral. I’m not simple. I like libraries with spirit and story. Not a chain store or something. Just saying’. 🙂

So. You can book an appointment to see the Franklin Carmichael exhibit at the AGS via their website, or just by calling 705-675-4871.

And, also…I’d always ask you to consider making a year end donation to the AGS. Here’s the thing: I don’t know about the rest of you, but as a single person who loves art, and who knows that all sorts of art has sustained her through this pandemic shit show of an apocalypse, I think we really need to support our local arts organizations. So…my favourites are the Art Gallery of Sudbury and the Sudbury Theatre Centre…but you’ll have your own. If you’ve enjoyed a podcast, a bit of music through the darkest of nights this year, or a recorded Stratford Festival play, or even a poetry reading that’s been streamed live and then recorded for later consumption…I just think it’s the decent thing to ‘pay it forward’ right now. If you need another reason, well…I guess I’d say that’d be your old paper or emailed tax receipt, but…I’m hoping you’ll really think of what’s gotten you through this year…and I’m betting that the arts–theatre, music, literature, and visual art–has played a role in keeping you sane….if you’re honest about it. I could be wrong, but I doubt it…

Go see this exhibit at the Art Gallery of Sudbury. And, please, while you’re at it, think about becoming a member.

From all of this, I’ve learned…that ‘stuff’ doesn’t matter. Experiences do. People do. Stuff with logos…that’s stuff from ‘the before times.’ Don’t carry that nonsense forward into the new world…or else…you’ll be with the anti-maskers…and you won’t have learned that much at all…from this time…that is both a blessing and a curse.

Thanks, too, to the AGS and Nancy Gareh, for asking me to take part in editing their education guide for this exhibit. I’m honoured that you asked me. It feels, really, a bit of a return to my beginnings with art…and I’m thankful for the gift of remembering that time…when I was much younger.

And…also…how to say this? Don’t forget to look at the mugs to the right of the entrance door. I was lucky enough to get a Heather Topp mug and so I’ll cherish it when I drink coffee in the mornings.

peace, people…

k.

An Afternoon at the Art Gallery of Sudbury & “Change of State/Alteration”

There’s something lovely about being back inside an art gallery after months of not being there. For me, the Art Gallery of Sudbury is a “home place” of sorts. I spent my 20s there, first as a volunteer, and later as a contract worker who managed media communications for a short time. I met my first love through the AGS, when we were both taking an art history course at Laurentian during our undergrad. He was in the French section of the course, and I was in the English one. We met haphazardly during a joint class field trip to see an exhibit. (I still remember that I had no idea who he was, but that he had nice eyes, was funny, and could carry a witty conversation. That impressed me. I went back to the gallery, two days later, to find his name in the guest book. I was infatuated. The things you do when you fall in love for the very first time…) In any case, from that time, in my early 20s–until now–in my late 40s, the Art Gallery of Sudbury has played a starring role for me in my life.

I’ve written a poem, and a play, about how I encountered Mrs. Bell’s ghost while I worked there in my late 20s, and I’ve rarely missed an exhibition while I’ve lived in Sudbury. Times living in North Bay, Ottawa, and Kingsville found me searching out other art galleries like someone with a strange addiction to visual art. I am. Addicted to art, I mean. So, during the pandemic at its deepest lockdown, I most missed walking alongside the lake and also just going to the gallery to be in that space. There, I honestly sort of am in a timeless space, able to be in and out of my body simultaneously. It’s a creative vortex for me, and a major part of my heart and life.

When the letter to members came in the mail last week, saying that you could book a time slot on certain days, I called in right away. The gallery was open again! This reopening exhibit is titled, aptly, “Change of State/Alteration,” reflecting the historic and fluid time within which we’re living. You’re allotted forty-five minutes, which is a good amount of time. At the door, you’re greeted and you’re asked to wear a mask. Every staff person I saw while I was there was wearing a mask, and the person who was there to answer my questions about the exhibit was aware of social distancing. At the inside door, there’s a bottle of hand sanitizer, some disposable masks (in case you don’t come with your own), and gloves, if you’re super nervous. But, I mean, let’s face it…you don’t need gloves…unless you’re planning on illegally touching the art…but…that’s another story for a bit later on here…

Covid-19 protocols for a safe visit are visible at the inside door, and then there are hand sanitizing stations throughout the galleries.

Gallery 1 is full of beautiful pieces from the Permanent Collection. Now, don’t tell me that you don’t like pieces from Permanent Collections. I LOVE THEM! It’s like someone let you wander around inside a secret wardrobe and pull out a variety of the best vintage dresses to try on in your bedroom! Here are pieces that the gallery has housed for years, and that have been brought out to share. I love this notion so much, especially when you consider the theme of the work.

The first one on the wall is a tiny piece by noted Canadian artist, Joyce Wieland (1930-1988). I saw an exhibit of her work at the McMichael a few years ago and was amazed. This is Sailboat Tragedy, #1 (1963). It’s self-explanatory, and kind of voyeuristic in a strange way as your gaze drifts from panel to panel, knowing what’s about to come even as you dread it. It looks simple, this Wieland, but it’s not. It sets the tone for what we’re living through, a life that seemed to be sailing along in a lovely fashion, and then is so easily upended without warning. Pandemics will do that, it seems, and we’re all learning that first hand this year.

Next to the Wieland is a massive Fred Hagan. It’s titled “Homage” (1991), and it’s overwhelmingly beautiful. The bench is well positioned in the gallery, because you’ll want to sit in front of this one for a bit. It’s Northern Ontario, in all of its gorgeously raw natural beauty. There’s a tiny image of self-portraiture, if you know where to look for it, and then there are figures of influential Group of Seven artists who painted so much of their work up here. There are allusions to specific paintings, so if you’re a Group of Seven fan, look for the clues in the trees and flowers. 🙂

Get up close to it, now. Take your time here. This is one not to be rushed. It takes up the space, and demands that you give it the time to do the same thing with your body, heart, and mind.

Tom Thomson is one of my favourite Group of Seven painters, and here he is depicted painting his wonderful piece, “The West Wind.” If you know Thomson’s work, you’ll know that that’s who’s painting in this corner of the Hagan piece. Then, move on to other parts of the painting, and see others of the Group who painted up here in Northern Ontario. It is Hagan’s homage to those who influenced him as a painter.

Here is Lismer, busy at work en plain air, his canoe next to him, a pan of freshly caught fish frying on a fire for him to eat after he’s done his work. (I get this. I forget to eat when I’m writing, too. Today’s the perfect example of that, with me pecking at things over a series of hours that seem out of time and place…and the art living in my head.)

The balance to this piece of Northern Ontario beauty and painterly history comes with an image that highlights Martin Luther King, pictured about John F. Kennedy. This is Carl Beam’s “King + Kennedy,” a piece that reminds us of the Black Lives Matter movement that began at the centre of the lockdown. A global virus that is called corona, and then the virus that has always been there–which is racism, discrimination, and colonialism.

From here, I was drawn to Jane Ash Poitras’s massive piece, titled “Shaman Never Die” (1988). It, too, is a counterpoint to the Hagan, and to this country’s colonial past (and present). Hers is work I have loved for years. You can stand in front of this one and find so many things to look at and think about.

Do yourself a favour here: don’t rush it when you’re in front of the Hagan, the Poitras, or the Odjig. All three…have a great deal to say about the times within which we’re living. All three speak to the notion of how our world is changing, and how our lives are impacted by those massive changes. What goes on out there in the world also goes on as a mirrored experience inside each of us, too. It affects us globally, but also individually. It is massive, and it’s okay to admit that, even though it can feel overwhelming sometimes…

In this piece of detail from the larger work, there’s the image of Poundmaker, as well as a repeated reference to the Lubicon Lake Cree. Poitras documents the ways in which the Alberta government allowed oil companies to drill on First Nations land. Hers is an art that is beautifully layered, a multi-media collage piece that is reflective of the colonial oppression and general bullshit that the Lubicon Cree have had to deal with–and fight against– for years and years.

The beauty of Gallery 1, though, for this exhibit is Daphne Odjig’s piece, “Spiritual Renewal” (1984). She estimated that it took her six months to paint, and it’s easy to see why. You’ll catch your breath if you stand in front of this one for a while and let it sink in.  As Odjig writes in her artist’s statement: “Spiritual Renewal is a historic portrayal of the spiritual culture shock associated with the arrival of the White Man’s religion. The first part of the panel shows the arrival of the missionaries and suggests confusion…The second panel depicts the return of…spiritual activities.” As she says “Spiritual renewal takes place within the heart and soul of all who see it.” You aren’t allowed to take photos of this piece, which makes it very special in my mind. It’s something you need to go to the gallery to see…to feel in your body, really.

The one thing I struggled with, and Tadd (the Gallery’s Visitor Services and Operations Co-Ordinator) know this all too well–sadly–is that I will always ask “Can I touch it?” if there’s something really unique happening. I mean, I always know that he’ll say no, but I always ask anyway.  In this exhibit, the thing that I most wanted to touch was a rock on the floor. It’s called “Zigzag Water,” (1986) and it’s by Bill Vazan. Just know that it’s also something you should see in person. It’s been carved into, so that there’s a pattern etched into it.

Talking about how landscape and environment can also change is reflected in Jana Sterbak’s “Dissolution” (2001), which documents a series of photographs taken of a chair made of ice. It melts, dissolving slowly from frame to frame. This is a reflection of how everything is constantly changing. In this case, one would easily think of global warming, but it seemed to me that it could also just be speaking to the notion that human lives are not at all about permanence. We are constantly evolving and changing–hopefully growing, if we’re lucky (and open) enough to do so. Besides that, though, we are not guaranteed a certain length of life. We are mortal. We are temporary. We change, and we live through change…

Upstairs, don’t miss the Doug Donley, David Blackwood, and Kenoujuak Ashevak ‘wall.’ If there were three pieces that meant the most to me in the whole building, these three would do it. Doug was a personal friend, and I have three of his pieces of work in my home. That he died much too young is always something that saddens me. His work is worth seeing, if you haven’t encountered it yet. Blackwood, well, he thrills me because he’s from Newfoundland and because his etchings are always stories waiting to be discovered and told. Kenoujuak Ashevak…gah…how do I even explain my love of her work? Go and see it and you’ll understand. Words…don’t suffice. (And also–do not forget to take a look at the Bruno Cavallo painting in Gallery 2, as well as the Mary Green piece.)

***

The star of the everything at the AGS right now, though, is local artist Pandora Topp’s pandemic work. You’ll need to step into Mrs. Bell’s conservatory space first. Sit down and take the time to watch a couple of Pandora’s videos. Her project is titled “Imperfect Poetry.” Right away, I knew I was going to love it. I’m a fan of Pandora’s work, and have been for years. She’s a bright light in town, within the arts and culture community, and I love to watch her act on stage.

“Imperfect Poetry” started as an artistic prompt as part of a creative challenge that was extended to Pandora by Charlotte Gowdy, and offered by Haley McGee, all of it connecting artists from here and the UK. The notion is that you “show up for 14 days and create for 10 minutes each day.” It’s a wide open field of creativity!

I love these collaborative arts projects, especially in times when creatives are even more isolated than they might usually be. (I always think it’s funny that people assume that all creatives and introverts would excel at quarantine and lockdown. We’re all still humans, after all, and it can be difficult to be in small, isolated pockets for long periods of time when we’re used to being around other creative people. While what we do must be done in quiet places and solitary spaces, we also need to share our work, to feel connected, and to feel that our work has a purpose and ripples outwards…)

Here’s what’s really wonderful about Pandora’s pandemic project: you get to see her creative process as a *process* in its truest form. There are computerized notes, as well as handwritten journal entries. Alongside those two more literary elements, she has included some sketches. Go from left to right, and take the time to read the documents. I am in love with cursive writing. The more at risk it is of disappearing from our culture these days, the more I fall in love with it. I gather up old letters written by my mum and grandmother, taking them out when I want to remember them more closely. I have always thought that cursive writing is like a fingerprint of soul and personality. You can see a person’s handwriting and know who it belongs to. You can feel a rush of love for someone if you recognize the way they cross their Ts or tuck the loops of their Ys under things.

I know I’ll need another visit, mostly just because I want to go back and read Pandora’s work more carefully. I kept thinking, as I read the pieces of writing, “Oh, sweet Jesus, I hope she publishes these things somewhere…”

What I love about “Imperfect Poetry” is that so much of what artists and writers do is create something. We create to press against the dark. We stir up magic and light, and then we share it. I’m sure each of us has our own specific way of explaining how this works, but what struck me as I read her work yesterday afternoon is that we all need to ‘get it out’ somehow. It’s about finding your voice, about moving through the grief and loss of lockdown. In one piece, she writes: “Weep today if you must. Listen to the high water mark, or low…the pull of the tides are within you.” Yes. Let yourself feel the emotion inside your body, she says. Feel it deeply. Honour it. And then, find yourself in your own body; give yourself a true voice that carries…outwards…and a voice that ripples.

You can listen to some of Pandora’s fine work here:

***

This whole exhibit, including Pandora Topp’s “Imperfect Poetry,” runs until Saturday, September 5th. I really hope it’s extended, though, so that more people have time to go and see it. You can register for a visit–for yourself and five of the people in your immediate social bubble–by contacting the Art Gallery of Sudbury at 705-675-4871. It’s open from Tuesday to Saturday right now, with a certain number of visits slotted into each day.

Too, I think it’s a fair time to remind those of you who love art in Greater Sudbury that we really need to reach out and tangibly support our arts organizations. You can become a member of the Gallery for a reasonable fee, but you can also now really show your love by joining the Franklin Carmichael Circle. They’ll send you a tax receipt when it’s time, too, so you don’t even have to think about that part.

It’s another long blog entry, I know…but it’s worth it. If you can, go and see this exhibition. The Gallery’s done a fine job at making itself safe and creative, leading the way in showing us how the arts will survive in creative and innovative ways in the times of a global pandemic…and beyond.

Without the arts, what do we have….?

peace,

k.

 

 

 

Notes from a Pandemic: Why a safe return to school in Ontario should be the priority

Something is making my heart ache today.

I’ve been following the Twitter posts of a variety of scientific, medical, and educational experts of late. I’ve been watching the various news conferences that come out from Ontario’s Ministry of Education. I’ve been watching the parents who are wise (and emotionally torn) enough to know that they need to “follow the science” and their hearts at the same time. I’ve been watching the slew of people who bash teachers coming out of the woodwork on social media, and I’ve been watching other educators worry and fret about how best to ensure a safe return to schools this fall. What I hadn’t expected to read was a heartbreaking Tweet from a student, Isaiah Towers, who lives in the catchment area of the Limestone District School Board (which includes areas like Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox, and Addington).

Here’s what Isaiah wrote: “As a student, I can confirm I’m terrified. So are a majority of students. Personally, I feel like I’m getting sent back to die. But if I don’t go my education will slip even more.” He was responding to a parent’s tweet, responding to an adult who is advocating for a safe return to school. He was saying out loud what so many kids must be thinking. I don’t know Isaiah personally, but…as a teacher…I know Isaiah is just one of thousands of young Ontarians who are really afraid and worried right now, and who are looking for adult leadership in a crisis.

So. Here’s the thing. We need to listen to Isaiah’s voice above other voices.

We don’t need to listen to Doug Ford’s voice, or Stephen Lecce’s voice, or the voices of our various Board of Education Directors and Superintendents, or the voices of Trustees. If we wait to listen to those voices, the voices that are embedded within a power structure that is already archaic and mostly colonial and patriarchal in its historic origins, then…well…we aren’t really listening to Isaiah, are we? And we definitely aren’t listening to our students’ or our children’s deepest worries. This won’t be a popular opinion, maybe, but I sort of think it doesn’t matter anymore. I know other teachers are likely thinking similar thoughts…or I hope they are.

What matters, then? The safety of Ontario’s children. That’s it. That’s what matters at the core of it all. Some will say, “Oh, you’re a teacher, so you’re lazy, and you’re not wanting to teach, and you get paid way too much, and you get summers off, and this is just another way to avoid doing your job.” Those are some of the voices who will always be there. They’ve been there for decades, but their voices have been steadily increasing with each and every passing year. I’m not sure why, to be honest, because the career of being an educator at the elementary or secondary level of study these days–anywhere across North America, I’d venture a guess–is more complex now than it’s ever been.

Teachers don’t just “deliver curriculum,” but we also serve as role models, as pseudo-parents for those kids who come from abusive homes, and as social workers for those children who might not have enough to eat at home, or who might be self-harming due to mental health issues. We’re called upon to do things that our predecessors never did. Still, teachers do what needs to be done, and often without a parade or any kind of fanfare. Teachers, you see, aren’t in it for the money. If you ask any teacher why they initially entered into the profession, you’ll likely hear that it’s because they love to learn, that they’re curious, that they’re interested in the world around them, that they like to ask questions and think, and–here it comes, now…get ready for the truth–that they love to be around kids, even if they don’t have kids of their own.

If we get caught up in that “teacher bashing” mess, though, which most teachers have put up with for a very long time, then we’ll miss the forest for the trees. If the ‘trees’ in this case are the bashers (for lack of a better phrase), then the ‘forest’ is made up of our kids. Yup. They’re “our kids,” even if they go home to your house and you’re called ‘Mum’ or ‘Dad.’ They’re “our kids,” too.

So…let’s talk about protecting our ‘forest,’ then…just for a little bit.

If we look at Premier Ford’s “plan” to return to school, which was released last week, and which is based–in a very wobbly fashion–on the Sick Kids report, we can see that parts have been addressed and parts have been avoided. The parts that have been avoided, it seems to me, are the parts that are the most important…and the most expensive to address. Funny how that works, eh? Easier to say you support a ‘plan’ you’ve created, based on a medical report, when you can pick and choose which pieces work best. Then, fast forward to yesterday, and a reference by Premier Ford that begins to discount the ‘plan’ to return safely in September, the very plan that was his party’s last week. “It’s not our plan…I’d be nervous if my kids were back in school…The other thing is they don’t have to put their kids in school.”  This is back pedalling of the highest order, if you ask me. Whose plan is it? And, let’s be honest…it’s not a plan…so….where exactly is the plan?

No one likes a pandemic. I hate it. No one wants to be in a tiny bubble. We’re meant to be social creatures. This virus takes away what most makes us human, which is touch and gathering together, so that’s brutal. Absolutely so. But…what this virus does physically to people, in terms of how it affects a person’s health, is terrifying. It’s a shape shifter, I’d say, and the longer we muck through this mess, the results of scientific and medical studies that are coming out from around the world seem to be stranger and stranger. Children aren’t meant to be isolated. We know that. We know they do better when they’re in school, socializing and learning with kids their own age. This is true. Of course it’s not ideal that they’ve had to struggle with online learning. Nothing about a pandemic is ideal.

And, it’s not ideal that this pandemic has hit women, single parents, and those who are parts of marginalized groups, the hardest. COVID-19 has shown us where our failings are, as humans–in terms of equality, in terms of compassion, and in terms of our privilege. Our experience in Canada varies from other countries around the world, and our experience within our communities varies, too. If we own houses, we likely have a yard to escape into. If we live in low-income high-rises in larger urban centres, though, the pandemic has played out very differently.

You only need to look to the cases of school re-openings around the world, in recent weeks, to see what’s worked and hasn’t worked. You can look to cases in Montreal, in Israel, and–sadly–in two weeks’ time, likely most of America, as well. You can figure in that COVID-19 is more airborne than we’d thought it was initially, when we were all panicky and buying things in bulk. Then, back then, we thought it was only transmitted through touch. Now, thanks to the hard work of scientists around the world, we know it’s more about airborne transmission. It’s how we’ve come to know that masks help to reduce transmission. It’s how we’ve come to know that social distancing is key. It’s how Canada has managed to flatten the curve, in that we know we have a social responsibility to one another, and to those groups of people who are most at risk of being negatively affected by this virus.

This ‘plan,’ for a return to school, isn’t at all clear. It puts students, as well as all education workers–including principals, vice-principals, teachers, secretaries, cleaning staff, bus drivers, and cafeteria staff–at risk. Each and every one of those people in Ontario is at risk.  All four teaching unions put out a joint statement last week. The Ontario Principals’ Council put out a statement last week. None of them is saying that the Sick Kids report is wrong. It’s fine. But…the Sick Kids report is suggesting that a safe return to school means that Boards ensure smaller class sizes (call them ‘cohorts’ or whatever fancy word you want, but it’s just about making classes smaller in size). This means that Boards across the province are now scrambling to sort it out over the next three weeks. They’re trapped between a rock and a hard place.

You see, if you reduce class sizes, especially after the recent cuts to teaching positions in Ontario over the last two years, then you need to hire more teachers, and you need to find more space in which to hold classes. All of this means you need to invest more money into the places where it really touches kids. You need to re-imagine education in a way that allows teachers to teach in community spaces that could be rented to school boards. You need to think outside the box of a system that still works on the premise upon which it was founded, which, if you study the history of education in Ontario means that the patriarchal and colonial structure we’ve inherited might not work in the face of a pandemic. This might actually be the best and most opportune time to be creative in reimagining how education works at the elementary and secondary level. That’s a whole other blog, and there are lots of other people who know much more about this particular notion.

What we need for the fall, though–and that means it could be a later start than September, if people really do want a “safe start” for kids and education workers–is smaller class sizes at both levels of study, physically distanced classes, alternative teaching spaces, better ventilation in schools, and PPE for education workers. And, yes, we need students to wear masks, too. It is, for now, for these times, what will help us to ensure everyone’s safety.

This is a long blog. If you’ve read through it all, thanks for that. If you’re a parent, know that teachers worry as much about your kids as you do. If you’re a teacher, know that we’re likely all as worried and freaked out, but just don’t know what to do. If you’re a principal or vice-principal, God, I don’t know…thank you for trying to guide the staff in your schools in an uncertain and anxious time. If you’re in a school board office, I don’t envy you your role, either. You have to ensure the safety of thousands of people under you, on your watch. You have to dance a difficult dance between the Ministry, and unions, and teachers, and parents, and students. That’s a huge responsibility. I wouldn’t want it, but I know you’ll try your best to make it safe for all of us under you. I know this because…you were once classroom teachers, too, even if you aren’t now. I know you won’t forget those early days, even if you’re in big fancy offices with name plates now. I know you love kids as much as we all do.

If you’re in the Ministry of Education…and you’ve never been a teacher…you shouldn’t be there right now. If you’re meeting by Zoom, and you don’t want to sit in a class of 28 kids during the fall cold and flu season, then you shouldn’t be there now. But…if you are there now…then it’s incumbent upon you to make sure our kids are safe. It’s incumbent upon you to make sure Isaiah, and all of the thousands of kids across Ontario, are safe. If that means putting more money into health and safety measures that actually show up in the lives of classroom teachers across Ontario, then that’s what you need to figure out.

We have three weeks. People can get creative. The money needs to be there, though, or else we’re looking at kids in classrooms that aren’t socially distanced, and we’re looking at teachers and education workers falling ill when they don’t need to, and we’re looking at community spread, and we’re looking at hospitals that will be over run when they don’t need to be. The bubbles…won’t matter at all…and we’ll see how that plays out in a very terrifying way.

I just hope…we can all be together on this one thing. The Isaiahs of this province deserve our best because–guess what?–we’re the adults here. We need to step up to make it a safe return, even if it’s staggered or different from what it usually looks like. The old Sears catalogue photo of kids in plaid skirts and maroon shaded cardigans just won’t do it this year.

peace,

k.