AUDIO RECORDED ON LOCATION BY SACHA OUELLET AND ERICA HIROKO ISOMURA AT THE WEDZIN KWA, KWECWECNEWTXW (COAST SALISH WATCH HOUSE), HOLMES CREEK, BRUNETTE RIVER, BURNABY LAKE, AND SKᵂƛƏMA:ɬ STÁL̓ƏW̓(COQUITLAM RIVER) · Photo by Sacha Ouellet

Art and activism are necessary to sustain hope, especially in hard times like the present. In June and July 2021, poets Rita Wong, Emily Riddle, and Sacha Ouellet joined me to record the audio project “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim,” a poetry exchange and conversation about waterways and the Trans Mountain (TMX) pipeline project, which connects us spatially across western Canada. This audio segment launched as a podcast and was featured at Vancouver’s Powell Street Festival last year. It weaves together a rich conversation featuring poetry and discussions on identity, culture, politics, and climate issues. Amidst varied relationships to land and migration, the four of us exist in a hybrid space as poets, organizers, and community members, the intersections of which shape the project.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about climate grief, and just like grief, as all these residential school sites are investigated further … I don’t think people understand that those things are so intimately connected,” Riddle says, from the eastern side of the pipeline in amiskwaciwâskahikan, or “beaver hills house,” also known as Edmonton. Whether it be fossil fuels or beaver pelts, the removal of Indigenous people is intrinsic to resource extraction and commodification in Canada. “I don’t think most people would connect those two things at all—children were removed in order to have these developments [on the land].”

Wong, who is also an educator, believes “it is not too late … to repair relationships that should have been better in the first place” and that “part of the work is to educate ourselves on what we should have learned all those years ago.” Wong’s recent work in community has included supporting 1308 Trees, an art project raising awareness about the trees being cut down by TMX in Burnaby’s Brunette River watershed, and writing about on-the-ground land defence at Ada’itsx (Fairy Creek). “My family comes from the Pearl River Delta in Southern China and wherever we happen to live, I think it is important to understand or try to learn about the waterway that we are part of.”

While sharing poetry, Ouellet reads a poem that honours her relationship to fireweed, a companion found growing both where she lives in Vancouver, and more rurally up north, where she has spent time at the Unist’ot’en camp and in her homelands of Gwaii Haanas. She asserts belief in “the power of love for the land and love for each other, compassion for the land, and also, knowing, while Mother Nature is having reactions, the end of the world isn’t here.” This segment also includes Wong’s poetry from undercurrent (Nightwood Editions, 2015) and new work from Riddle’s forthcoming chapbook with Glass House Press. Each respective poem offers a witnessing of the self and others in relation to care for these occupied lands and waters.

One of the most notable layers to this project is the sound of waterways. The audio features soundscapes from salmon-bearing rivers, creeks, and lakes from the Wedzin Kwah, Holmes Creek, Brunette River, Burnaby Lake, skʷƛ̓əma:ɬ stál̕əw̓ (Coquitlam River), and Kwekwecnewtxw (also known as the Coast Salish Watch House—next to Silver Creek), each of which are currently being affected by major development, resource extraction, and transportation projects, including TMX, Coastal GasLink, and CN Rail.

As someone who grew up alongside the great Stō:lo (Fraser River), I see this work as part of my own relationship-building to the lands I occupy. In the coming months, I intend to keep writing new work in response to the rich and generous conversation exchanged with Wong, Riddle, and Ouellet.

In the meantime, “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim” has been released for free on SoundCloud. While the news blasts doom and gloom, artists, activists, policy makers, and everyday people continue to make change in little ways each day.

As Ouellet proclaims, “it can feel very hopeless but it is not, I promise you.”

The full audio of “From the Prairies to the Pacific Rim” with Rita Wong, Emily Riddle, and Sacha Ouellet can be streamed at soundcloud.com/ehiroko.

Photos courtesy Party Trick Press

When Natahna Bargen-Lema and Megan Fedorchuk launched Party Trick Press, they didn’t shy away from lofty goals. With a mission of revolutionizing eLiterature and bringing higher standards of diversity, accessibility, and inclusion to the publishing process, the digitally focused press aims to challenge the publishing industry’s complicated reputation.

Soft launched in October 2020, Party Trick curates literary works by current and up-and-coming authors. Among them are former City of Edmonton Youth Poet Laureate Timiro Mohamed (Incantations of Black Love), Furqan Mohamed (A Small Homecoming), and D’orjay the Singing Shaman (Shit My Shaman Says, Volume 1).

“Party Trick Press is truly a pandemic baby,” says Bargen-Lema, herself a writer. After losing her job, she called Fedorchuk, a long-time friend and former colleague from the University of Saskatchewan. “It spiralled from there!”

“I agreed before we even had a fully formed idea,” says Fedorchuk. The pair haven’t seen each other since before the pandemic began. Separated geographically, Fedorchuk lives in Toronto while Bargen-Lema is in Edmonton.

Party Trick was born of a belief that eLiterature is undervalued, yet crucial for a number of reasons. It’s accessible, allowing readers to download ebooks on a variety of devices, using magnification and read-aloud features. It also reduces paper waste. To increase financial accessibility and to challenge the publishing industry’s capitalist model, Bargen-Lema and Fedorchuk have adopted choose-what-you-pay price points.

“We’re always learning. We’re always evolving,” says Bargen-Lema, noting that the press is continuously researching opportunities to be increasingly accessible. Aware of the space they’re taking up as white women, Bargen-Lema and Fedorchuk agree that a key value is “creating a platform that is truly inclusive, that people feel represented by, that people can feel comfortable sharing on,” says Fedorchuk. A positive and collaborative experience for authors is also of utmost importance.

“Every single person that reaches out and trusts us with their words is just so humbling.… We do feel like there’s a place for us here. There’s a need for this type of work,” says Fedorchuk.

Photo courtesy Goose Lane Editions

“Bent out of joint / in order to hold every-thing together. Won’t snap, won’t dissolve in an acid bath.” These are the opening lines of Self-Portrait as Paperclip, from Fredericton-based writer Triny Finlay’s third book, Myself A Paperclip, in which she transforms an inconspicuous office article into a clever metaphor for those attempting to hold everything together. The queer writer’s first book-length long poem was published in October 2021 with Goose Lane Editions.

The collection details experiences with stigma surrounding mental illness, trauma, treatments, and life in the psych ward. With section titles such as “You don’t want what I’ve got” and “Adjusting the Psychotropics,” Finlay’s words serve as a call to action for mental illness and its treatments to be normalized, and for the needs of those living with mental illness to be met with more compassion.

The title Myself A Paperclip was conceived from her poem Self-Portrait as Paperclip, although the author admits she originally had another title in mind. “I had all these lists, dozens of possible titles, and the one that I liked best was ‘Nothing like a mad woman’ from [the song “mad woman” on] Taylor Swift’s folklore album, which I was obsessively listening to,” she laughs. Due to foreseeable copyright issues, Finlay had to abandon this option.

“I wrote [Self-Portrait as Paperclip] during a really fraught period of my life where I was struggling with a lot of changes in my life. I was going through a divorce, I was coming out more publicly as queer, I was just dealing with a lot,” she says. “So I went back to that poem … as a touchstone for the whole book and realized it said everything I wanted the book to say about trauma, mental illness, and treatment.”

The section of her book titled “You don’t want what I’ve got,” which was previously published as a chapbook by Junction Books in 2018, became the impetus for the collection. This section initially zoned in on unrequited love, with the author ultimately realizing that it was time to shift focus.

“I started to ask myself: why am I writing about unrequited love? What is it that I need to say about that?” It occurred to her that the parts of her “novel-esque” long poem involving the main character’s obsessions and compulsive behaviours arising from unrequited love were what interested her the most. Trashing the bulk of the manuscript she’d been working on for over 10 years, Finlay took another swing at the project. “I wanted to write about how a person loses their mind, and how people are treated when they lose their mind…” she explains.

She also found it important to incorporate humour into the collection. In the section titled “Psych Ward Types: a List,” she candidly reflects on her stays in the psych ward, bringing to life a list of characters who offer comedic consolation to a situation that Finlay recounts as absurd.

“You know, people with mental illness also run the gamut of emotional experience, so there can be humour.”

The writer hopes that her book has the potential to shine a light on the nuances of living with mental illness. From stunned silences to voiced concerns from loved ones regarding medication, Myself A Paperclip showcases ample instances of stigma-fueled behaviours and actions that need to be continually addressed.

“For me, one of the major obstacles when we bring mental health issues to the table is that often the people who are talking about it, writing about it, treating it, legislating it, trying to accommodate it in the workplace, are the people who are the least affected by it personally,” she says. “I think people need to check their beliefs. I think they need to check their values, change their behaviour, offer actual compassionate support…”

Finlay encourages writers to derive inspiration from their own lives, especially individuals belonging to marginalized groups. “I think the writing that comes from lived experience, especially of conventionally excluded groups—so communities who haven’t always been given the right to speak or the right to be heard—is often the strongest work,” she says. “For me, from an ethical standpoint, it is really important to consider the lived experience of the people who are going through these kinds of struggles.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURENCE PHILOMÈNE

In the opening letter of their debut poetry collection, knot body, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch writes: “The days get brighter but somehow I don’t. A dilemma, right? I thought I was swayed by the light, moods lifting as the clouds lift, yet this pain is fingers deep.”

El Bechelany-Lynch’s writing is at once an intimate inventory and a daring confession of what it means to listen to one’s body—all the ways that capitalism and ableism marginalize and dismiss queerness, chronic pain, invisible disability, and race. Their collection hugs the line between non-fiction and poetry. “I wanted to move past a disabled body as one that is to be understood, and rather as one that can be experienced—like a person who can be experienced,” they say.

Many poems in knot body take the form of letters addressed to “Dear friends, lovers, and in-betweens,” conveying an intimacy which urges us to consider the specificity of their pain, but also to examine our own relationships with our bodies. El Bechelany-Lynch began writing to the people around them as a way of thinking about their queer friendships and as a way of creating intimacy, but the poems have found a wider resonance.

“A lot of my work and anything that I do is really trying to reach other POC, any BIPOC who are interested in reading my work, like other people with chronic pain, other disabled people,” says El Bechelany-Lynch. A few people who had chronic pain didn’t realize they did—until they read knot body—and messaged El Bechelany-Lynch to share words of appreciation. “It was so touching. It was just really nice to be like, ‘Okay cool, it can function that way too, it can be a way to validate someone’s experience’ … that’s probably one of the best things I could hear.”

Though knot body offers consolation, the author says it was not easy to write. The process was draining and breaks were necessary. “Writing about chronic pain is difficult because it brings me to a space where I’m recognizing my pain and I think a lot of the ways people cope with chronic pain is that your body does the work of dissociating,” says El Bechelany-Lynch. “When I was writing about it specifically, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, my neck pain, my leg hurts’—all these ways I was being constantly confronted with the physicality of my body.”

While knot body (released in fall 2020 with Metatron Press) is El Bechelany-Lynch’s first book to be published, their second book of poems, The Good Arabs (forthcoming with Metonymy Press in fall 2021) has been six years in the making. The Good Arabs tackles the complexity of the Arab diaspora and its complicated colonial histories. El Bechelany-Lynch was born in Montreal and has lived there for almost a decade, but spent a part of their childhood in Lebanon.

Although The Good Arabs differs formally from knot body’s hybrid epistolary poems, poetry is still the ultimate vehicle for all of El Bechelany-Lynch’s work. “I wouldn’t say it’s standard or traditional poetry, because I don’t know that I write that, but it’s more recognizable as poetry,” they say. “I think poetry allows for complication … I feel like with an essay I would be able to be like, ‘This happened and this happened and, oh yes, we contend with this.’ But what does it mean to intersplice everything in a poem where everything is juxtaposed?”