The first time I met Merilyn Simonds was at the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Lumsden, Saskatchewan, in the heat of July 2014. There were fields of canola and flax, and the threat of too many ticks. I was in a poetry colloquium with Ken Babstock, but writers gathered together at meals, as well as in the evening hours, and this meant that we met one another. Some of my most amazing friends have come from those ten days in the prairies. We are geographically scattered across the country, but stay in close touch. You can bond in ten days, when it comes to writers who like to speak to other writers. I think this is because writers are intelligent, witty, creative, and fairly excellent conversationalists. It’s kind of magical when you make these soul connections, if you’re open to them.
We first spoke one night near the end of the ten days. This was after seeing Merilyn dancing with her partner, Wayne, late one night, in the lounge that looks out over the beautiful Qu’Appelle Valley. (In the day time, you can see the fields and the sky seems alive with weather. At night, the stars and the moon are bigger than anywhere else. They hang in the sky like glass Christmas ornaments.) I still remember that Merilyn was wearing a polka dot dress and that the two of them were obviously in love, swirling around the space gracefully, and lighting it up so that we were all in awe. I also remember thinking, “Wow. Now that’s the kind of love I’d like.” If you know the two of them, you’ll already know what I mean. It’s a grand partnership. They radiate friendship, intellect, spontaneity, generosity of spirit, and love. As writing mentors, well, their reputation is a bright one. Find any writer in Canada who has encountered one of the two, or both, in a workshop setting, in some shape or another, and you’ll find someone who has learned something important about their own work.
After they were done dancing, we somehow spoke. Afterwards, we kept in touch, but I didn’t see Merilyn again until last May, when I was on Pelee Island for a writing retreat. She and Wayne were there at Spring Song, supporting Margaret Atwood’s work for the Pelee Island Bird Observatory (PIBO). Then, last June when I went to the Alice Munro Festival in Wingham with two friends, we met again and I sat in on her historical fiction workshop because I was working on my first novel at the time. I was also on the organizing committee for Wordstock, Sudbury’s literary festival, so I rather boldly asked if she and Wayne would consider coming up to Sudbury in November 2017. She agreed. Since we first met, I’ve read her books, and have fallen in love with her writing. (My favourite is “The Holding,” in case anyone cares! 🙂 )
The first time I heard about Hugh Barclay was when my friend, Toronto performance poet, Tanya Neumeyer, gave me the gift of a tiny little book of poems and told me about her friend, Hugh. She spoke glowingly of him, of how much he loved the process of making books, from his consideration of choosing paper, or type of ink, or even how books should be bound or (in Tanya’s case!) folded. Here is the tiniest book of haiku poems I’ve ever seen. Hugh’s name hovered in my mind for a few years, and then rose up again when I read Merilyn’s brilliant book, Gutenberg’s Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels and the Lasting Impression of Books.
I’ve been thinking about the shape of books a lot lately. This is partly because I’ve recently read Diane Schoemperlen’s beautiful little chapbook from Woodbridge Farm Books. There, again, I was sent to thinking about the texture of paper, and the care and thought it takes to choose font, and how people choose to bind handmade books. Here’s an image of that lovely little essay, titled “One Thing Leads to Another: An Essay on Collage.” My favourite part about this little book from Kingsville (outside the content of the brilliant essay, of course!) is the sweet, thoughtfully placed red string that ties itself with a perfect knot in the middle of the collection. On a heart level of memory and experience, that little red thread and tiny knot reminds me of how my grandmother used to make me put my finger on a piece of ribbon, while I was helping her to wrap a box at Christmas when I was little, so that she could make a bow. (She likely knew I was horrid at wrapping, so sticking my finger there couldn’t really mess up her work, which was always lovely, and she made me feel useful and slightly talented, so she didn’t crush my spirit!)
These two little(r) books make me think of how beautiful things are not often in big fancy packages or wrappings. They remind me to look for the tiny ripples of beauty in daily life. I guess that’s why I’ve always been fond of small chapbooks of poetry, or even handmade paper journals. They make me think of daisies (my favourite flower next to thistles) and not tulips or roses, which seem too waxy and perfect sometimes. They make me think of taking one’s time, of knowing that crafting something carefully is worthwhile, especially in a world that doesn’t always think so…
Merilyn’s book is a love letter to book making. Not only that, it is an honouring of the process and art of how a writer’s work becomes a final, physical product. She writes about the history of paper, printing presses, and how inks have been made through history, and all through my reading of it, I can hear her voice in my head. (I know. It’s probably not good when you read and write about a work written by someone you know. I can hear her voice as I read and that’s sort of lovely. It’s conversational, inviting, and shows me how an excellent writer is almost always a stellar storyteller. 🙂 )
There is a discussion of how things have evolved, from print to e-readers like Kindle and Kobo. I will say, right now, that I consider myself to be a bit of an anachronism. I like old things. Very old things. I love antiques. I love old books. I love history and art. If you put me in an art gallery, you have to mind me in case I lean in too closely to a piece of art. I often feel like they magnetize me. The same thing happens if you ask me to your house because I will go around touching walls, or bits of old doorways and windowsills. I have often said, when I come across an old house I fancy, “Oh, I could marry this house.” At first, people snicker, but then they realize I’m fairly serious. Then they think, I’m sure, “Oh, God. Who’s this woman, then?! How quickly can we get her out?” My favourite thing to do, though, when I go into a person’s house for the first time, is to look at the books in their bookcases. I’m nosy. Collected books will serve as a mirror to a person’s soul, I often think, so then I’ll be bent over and peering at what’s on the lowest shelf. It’s usually the most interesting one!
Gutenberg’s Fingerprint doesn’t say that old is better than new, that print is better than pixels. Instead, Simonds herself admits: “I suffer the anxiety of a culture in flux” and says that we are “caught in a paradigm shift. Words are the constant, with paper on one shore, pixels on the other.” I get the flux thing. I had an e-reader on my iPad, and it was grand when I was traveling by plane, but it (too often) fell on my face or shoulder when I fell asleep reading in bed. Books will, in my experience, cause less of a concussion when I’m reading at night. 🙂 I also have the worst eyesight known to humankind, so my eyes get too tired when I read on a screen.
Last year, when I was at Banff for Lawrence Hill’s session on historical fiction, I met two writers from Calgary who also love the art of book making with a passion. One is Monica Kidd, a writer who loves to experiment with typeface and letter presses. The other is Sandra McIntyre, who is intrigued by Baskerville’s font, and his life. There were nights of conversations about fonts out in Banff, too, that intrigued me, and I learned more about letter presses in those ten days than I had known in my entire life. It’s funny to me, now, that I’ve had pieces of the book making process swirling around me in the last year or two. And then I came to Gutenberg’s Fingerprint.
I love this book deeply. It’s kept me reading rather steadily for the past few days, and with a number of things pressing down on me, including emergency vet visits and a bit of worry about trying to finish a manuscript of essays in the next two and a half weeks, it’s offered me respite and distraction. This book, this week, has offered me a place where I can find some solace, delving headfirst into stories about how many kids first encounter printing with halves of raw potatoes that are etched out with designs and then dipped into primary colours of paint, or to stories around the history of the Gutenberg Bible, or to the history of parchment and how it’s linked to a “a narrative of conquest and invention.”
The thing I love most about it, though, is that it documents a dear friendship. As someone who really doesn’t have much of a family anymore, my friends are that to me. What Simonds does, throughout the narrative about making her book, The Paradise Project, is weave in a story of how people meet, and how both can share in the teaching and learning process, and how interconnected we can be on a soul level. I love that. It’s about depth—of friendship, of craft, of artistry. (I know, too, that my friend Tanya feels the same way about Hugh, especially when I recall how her face lit up when she spoke to me about him, and how their friendship is so dear to her.)
This book is about making books, yes, but it’s about so much more. Anyone who just sees the ‘parts’ of the process, really, is missing the beauty of Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, in my opinion. It’s a love letter to books, to words, to paper, to the Muse, to taking time to revise, to craft things with care, but it’s even more so a love letter to how interconnected we all are…if we are open enough to see it…if we let our hearts go first, so that our heads just follow a little bit behind. There’s the magic of it all.
peace,
k.
Leave a comment