it’s 2008 and for one summer every morning at five i rise and write gather and sift look out over this hour before me becomes we but that is not true there is no separation of states everything becomes star etched footsteps lift like sun, echo light from a distance draws down don’t stare float…
Category: craftsmanship
No Masterpiece: On Finding One Drum
Here’s the essay i wrote for Edmonton Arts Council’s 2015 Annual Report (pg. 11). Lots of other good stuff in this issue, too. But as for my piece, it took a while to know what to write. After all, it turns out (a little to my surprise) that my practice could be accurately described as…
Guitar Boys and Girls
It is a fact of life: Boys use guitars for sex. If you are a guitar girl, you’ll be approached by boys who will treat your guitar as an avatar for your body. Simple, obvious. What i’d tell my sons, if i had any, would be: Rock Goddom is the manifestation of sexual slavery,…
May 23rd: Birthing It For the World (the Cribbage Hand Year)
In this, the day after the occasion of the fulfilment of a cribbage hand of years since my father’s passing i talk at length with some of my kin and realise, it’s more than time to renovate You and Me Against the World though it must be said that has kept us alive. Imagine what we…
Day 25: Smoothing the Spirit
old houses hold on. the first day i saw this house i knew it was my home, knew its many windows. its east facing door was the first thing i painted. upstairs, early on, we removed that beige broadloom peculiar to quick flips. such old wood in some rooms refinished, but under the carpet, a ruin, old…
Bonus Poem:Moon Lune Luna Personal
Here’s the poem with which i started this year’s French/Spanish translation project. This is the version i collaged into a 3-language piece that i used to lure Madame Giselle Lemire into a crazy-fun trilingual performance experiment. Moon Lune Luna Personal En el fulcro Au point d’équilibre balance point between l’été y otoño la…
Day 19:Steady
it’s something you draw down from the stars so that you, too, become a cord tying earth into heaven.
Day 16: Spring Clean
in this corner, the fear of failure, the fear of wrong decisions, side-eye on the road not taken, forever judging might-have-been, seen in this light has to be shadowed and grim. clear that away. also the webbed corners cut to avoid fully inhabiting this space. do you admit to the glorious? day to day choices…
Day 14: Politics and the Hardware Store
nobody knows anyone our secret power lines and the larger lines underwriting over-arching, architecture of the power mad. the young women warriors yell at me, not knowing i’ve been yelled at all my life and i see it passing by. i was young when people hid native ancestry and my family refused that. it was…
Day 13:Ucluelet, Her Sea Cans
once upon the wild coast, before we turned back we stopped in ucluelet, whipped by rain and there, inside linked sea cans, the ocean denizens of barkley sound, of clayoquot sound of rocks and shoals around the town, tankbound lay in shallow water. touch them, know them, listen to fond stories of this seastar or…
Day 15: Hey Margaret
it is okay to say you were too busy writing oryx and crake to point at the indigenous connections there it is okay if you were too busy addressing feminism to consider how it is no accident that it arose here, where we have always had agency and where the initial arrivals from europe…
Day 4: Cannery Tour
Cannery Tour charlie meets us at the skytrain somewhere out in richmond’s kanji forests drives us to the shore, his wife and sons and we fly kites, walk driftwood speak of waitangi, how andrea’s homeland builds on that treaty how, here on the salish sea, history is a wave a long time coming in to…
