Hey! I won a Canadian National Magazine Award . . .

For a POEM no less. Isn't it amazing that we still HAVE NMA's for poetry? I was also nominated for a personal essay called Washing The Body, which I will also post here in the coming months.  

Thank you therefore to the wonderful strange eclectic GEIST magazine for publishing the poem, The Speed of Rust; Mr. Geist also bought me my ticket to the fabulous glamourous cocktail party and (diet) dinner. I would not have gone if Mary S and Stephen O of Geist hadn't sprung for the ticket. Thanks, too, to Michal Kozlowsky, assistant publisher at Geist and dinner companion (who put up with some curmudgeonly behaviour, alluded to below.)

At the glitzy NMA ceremony, I wore a red and grey flapper dress, red heels, and so much attitude that I actually went up a second time to collect an absent friend's award--until the Reader Digest lady hip-checked me as I ran for the stage. (She was late getting up there, what can I say? Who could miss posing for a picture with Zaib Shaikh twice? He's handsome; I demanded he embrace me; he complied. You know, he was the imam on Little Mosque on the Prairie.) Anyway, I actually HATE award ceremonies (she said, ungraciously). The more hype, the more irritated I become. Then of course I revised my position briefly upon winning.

I was very inspired by richness of the articles, illustrations, essays, photo spreads that were nominated and that won for their various (more than 30) categories. For an industry that is struggling mightily against all kinds of nasty funding and techno/media monsters, the breadth of ideas and talent and energy in our magazine industry is really dazzling.

Let's read more Canadian magazines!

And even a poem here and there . ..  I spent 20 minutes trying to get the extra space out from btn the lines, but hey. I just gave up.

The Speed of Rust

It rains.

My heart disintegrates for other reasons

while the bald eagle gazes at me

from the lifeguard’s chair.

His head is not white but scuffed, dirty.

He may look like a bird of prey but in fact

he is a fifty-two-year-old man

who has just crawled out of bed

with a hangover and a wife

he rarely loved well.

Whatever

was fine weather

in his life has turned

into the swamp-sky of March,

rain in April, through June,

and tomorrow is the first of July

though it’s hard to consider

celebrating Canada Day

with anything but a scream.

Which the bald eagle does:

the serrated thrust of his voice

shreds the grey light as he opens

his wings and lifts, lifts,

heaves himself into the heavy air.

There he goes, flapping over our stunned heads

toward the jungle that stalks Vancouver

like a panther, the same jungle

I fought in cold blood this morning,

so much fierce bamboo.

You and I walk the wide sand flats,

slick pewter acres of seaweed,

cracked shells, crabs scuttling sideways

like our desire. We are so close

to the barges that we see

a modern galley slave moving

(no stanza break)

feverishly about on the long deck.

He is silent in labour, I am silent

in sympathy, listening to you tell

how you think maybe you can’t marry her.

I suddenly remember my hedge clippers

lying on the grass in the back garden.

Tools rust if you leave them out

in this rain. They teach us, every year,

not to do it again.

Why it's all wrong takes so long to explain

that the tide begins to embrace our cold feet.

You could save yourself by drowning

but do not: we walk back to the stony shore

littered with condoms and weddings,

one of which will take place in exactly

forty days. You ask, a tear in your eye,

How much longer will it rain?

I reply, You’re lucky enough

to have choices. Old lover,

surprise yourself and make one.

Useless advice, like all advice

must be at this moment. You wring

your heart on the beach while on the far shore

landmines explode, men labour on

prison ships, children drown in wet sand

similar in weight to this wet sand

but lethal, marbled with blood,

impossible to walk away from.

You say you cannot walk away.

I say I know, I know, and think again

of my clippers in the grass,

the speed of rust. I say, 

You are a good man

and she is a good woman.

Kissing you goodbye, I wonder if

that is how bad marriages are made:

the hungry shovel of the heart

wants to break the clean surface of goodness,

get to the rich filth underneath.

I like how mistakes wait in our hands

like the orchids we crave for their beauty.

And because we don’t know how to grow them.

I like that we want to learn.

I love how we fail.

Mother's Day is coming . . .

May 3rd, 2013.

After a wonderful few days at the snowy The Banff Centre, where I gave the keynote address at the Creative Nonfiction Collective Conference--thank you to Myrna Kostash for being such a brilliant organizer (and a great dame) and to Ian Brown for all those vodka sodas--I came back to sunny, flower-blooming Toronto and some great news regarding one of my nonfiction essays. Written a couple years ago, Washing The Body was published a few months ago in Alberta Views magazine. Last month, it won the Alberta Magazine Publishers Award for best essay, and last week it was nominated for a Western Magazine and a National Magazine Award, too. (One of the poems from my new book Come Cold River was also nominated for a National Magazine Award. Yay!)

The reason I'm so pleased with these nominations is because the essay is about my mother's life and death, both of which were exemplary. The nominations honour my mother as much as they do my work. I owe so much to her; she was and is one of my greatest teachers and still a source of my inspiration. As I discovered when I wrote the piece, she taught me a great deal about freedom. It makes me happy to think that other people know her a little through my words. 

I would love to post the whole essay here, but it may be republished. I will keep you posted . . . And sorry to those who've come here hoping to read it. I promise to post it eventually . . .

My mother exclaiming over my son's traditional Korean first year outfit in 2006; she died less than two years later, last day of August 2008.

My uncanny ability to offend . . .

If only i could get paid for all the times I say the wrong thing . . . And, brilliantly, once I know I am saying the wrong thing, I cannot stop myself, I must continue to say the wrong thing in different ways, harder, like someone banging in that damn nail even though it's crooked . . .

(And in fact, I think the book I'm working on now is an attempt to do precisely that. Get paid for offense, I mean. Not to intentionally offend. Just to be offensive? No, no, not that either. But it seems to me that as you soon as you mix sexuality and motherhood--uh, are they not inseparable? But we DO separate them; we feel we must; that's why mothers ditch their make-up and their tight jeans and wear rubber boots every day--you are bound to irritate a number of people. Sexuality, motherhood, telepathy, the mousy treadmill of North American work life, homosexuality, sex-workers, floral arrangement . . . Writing a novel that is NOT about a man imprisoned in solitary confinement IS SO MUCH FUN.) 

But not to change my own subject, that of offending people. Two in one week! Trungpa Rinpoche, the Buddhist teacher widely credited with popularizing Buddhism in North America, once talked about being too incisive, too sharp. Not in a truly intelligent way, but with something to prove, cutting too quickly to the chase, trying to mold events or even just a moment to one's will. He describes (I think it's in the book called The Myth of Freedom) how intrusive that can be, how it can frighten people away. That's not exactly what happened, either time, but obviously the passage has leapt to my mind for a reason.

Interestingly, both of the offendees were men with a certain amount of power and recognition. So, in a way, I can't help but be PLEASED I offended them.

But you see, that's my problem. I LIKE IT, even though it keeps me awake at night. Not because I feel GUILTY (au contraire) but because I know, sometimes, that it's not politic, it's not good for My Career. (Ha! An entirely different post. My career! A writer in the 21st century, hearing those two words, does not know whether to laugh or grimly check to see if it's too late to become a postman. Or a therapist. See: several of my friends.)

I can even offend people in a meditation sit. You know, during that after-the-meditation part, when you're all sitting around talking about the edifying subject raised by the guest speaker. And someone will say something or a topic will be raised,gingerly and respectfully, and in my most respectful manner, I will express--what?

My enthusiastic, SPARKY--as in flaming, hot, jumpy--DISSENTING OPINION, and I will have a bristle in my voice, a certain BUT tucked into my attitude, a je-ne-sais-quoi-mais-je-sais-tres-tres-bien in my spine. It's like a porcupine enters the room, looking for a place to scratch its back.

I can't help myself. Scratch here, I say! Closer! Just this spot right here, mais OUI! I'll just open my mouth a bit wider. . . Perfect!

Is it really February 25?

It is, it is really February 25th. And why does time go faster the older we get? A friend of mine maintains that there is a physiological reason that time seems to speed up as we age, but, being in her 50's, she can't actually remember what that reason is. Is it  relativity? Not to mention physics. The speed is directly related to the fact that we are now on the other side of the mountain, and we are rushing downwards, careening towards the infinite space of death.

Sorry, people, but this is what happens in February. We must face death every winter before the slush of March comes and then, later on, the mud, and the brilliant yellow forsythia. My son pointed out a robin to me this weekend, and I said, My dear, it can't be a robin, but there it was, when I turned to look, red-breasted and insisting on spring.

Lately I've been doing something that writers should never do: checking out how many books I've sold and reading online reviews of my work, especially Burmese Lessons. The Lizard Cage was the better book, I agree, but it's important to remember how different the books are too. A novel; a memoir. A fictional accounting; a record of lived experience, my own lived experience, complete with my failures and my immaturity. (What did they expect, human perfection? How satisfying would that be, how believable?) Burmese Lessons is also very much the portrait of the artist as a young woman. It fascinates me how judgmental people are when they read about young women, adventure, and sex. Young men having adventure and sex are universally celebrated and indulged--in both fiction and nonfiction, and real life!--but even writing 'adventure' here seems like a dangerous move. As in, "Oh, my God, she calls being amongst those refugees and dissidents and suffering people in Burma and on the border an adventure! She's so callous and cruel, she's so self-involved." At the time I didn't think of it as an adventure--it was my life then, in my twenties and thirties, living abroad and trying to understand the world through my skin, trying to understand, what it meant as a writer to bear witness while not indulging in propaganda.  It was always a serious enterprise for me. But fifteen years on, in my 40's, of course I can see that it was also adventure: the adventure that my life has always been, complete, in the case of Burma, with political awakenings, impassioned relationships, and the demanding work of learning the history and culture of another country.

Yet when I read some of these online reviews, I laugh out loud. Some readers were so shocked by the sexual content of Burmese Lessons (which is, alas, pretty tame--was it the word 'cunt' that did it, do you think??) and others were so insulted that not only did the young woman live on the border in Thailand, but that her point of reference, of home, was a Greek island. Really--it seems to insult or bother (or make jealous?) a whole swath of readers, that it was Greece I pined for, as a place of beauty and peace, rather than Canada, where I was born. But that little shack on the island is still the place I pine for! Nothing's changed in almost 25 years, when it comes to my relationship with Greece. Until now, the island (like many Greek islands) has not been as sorely affected by the ravaged economy. But even if it were, I would still pine for my friends there, the sea, the land, which will endure.

Anyway. You'll be happy to hear (or maybe you'll be irritated and disgusted; whatever) that I'm presently writing a short novel FULL of sex. And collecting a series of shorter memoirs for another new book. And working, here and there, on the longer novel full of darkness. The dark stuff is, interestingly, what people crave the most. There is an appetite for trauma--and hopefully for overcoming or transforming trauma. But my Short Novel Full of Sex doesn't have much trauma in it. It's just mildly scandalous and inspired by Vita and Virginia. And, well, oddly, my local swimming pool. I can hardly wait to read the online reviews . . .

Well, frankly I wish I was in Iraq . . .

The Great Zab River, in the Zagros Mountains, Iraqi Kurdistan.

Well, Iraqi Kurdistan, that is, as you know I am not much for war zones and bloody sectarian violence. But peaceful Kurdistan DID have an effect on me, and I find myself yearning for it after spending half an hour trying to unlock my child's bike from a rusty fence in the rain in Toronto. In the dark. But it was impossible, as the bike lock would not unclench no matter how hard I clenched my teeth and then there was a scene with the child screaming and swearing (at me, of course) and swearing fealty to his bike. I am sure I am not the first woman to think, I would like to return to Iraqi Kurdistan and  . . . Learn Kurdish. Drink tea. Fight my way through the usual Middle Eastern wall of men to talk to a few women. (Which is what I went to Kurdistan FOR, actually, and believe me, that fortress wall was mighty thick.)

Stay tuned for my Globe and Mail article about Kurdistan, coming up in the next couple of weeks in the FOCUS section. I am working on a much longer essay about Kurdish women and FGM, but that won't see the light of day for a while.

Anyway, I promise not to run away to Kurdistan. At least not yet. I might go to Burma first. It's warmer this time of year, and my name is finally off the blacklist. Apparently, hotel costs in Rangoon have risen over 300%. So . ..  can I AFFORD Burma? it was already expensive a decade ago. Freedom is not free (as they say in . ..  Kurdistan! I'm mixing up my liberated areas.)

For those of you who have come late to this blog post, I initially had a further and very funny rant about said child's bike lock and father and the mystery of what one is actually thinking about when one decides to go ahead and have kids. But it was all too ranting and misbehaved, so I decided to remove it before my precocious child decided to read it or one of the school moms saw it.

Is it censorship? Yes. Yes, it is, here in the blogosphere . . .

Ah, Kurdistan . . .

Poets enter the fray swinging . . .

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/canadian-poetrys-unlikely-renaissance/article4554863/

I posted this on my Facebook Page recently:

Irritated by Russell Smith's recent article on Canadian intellectual poetry (linked above). As if that's all there is. Or, that's all that's worthy. Never mind Crozier's carrots fucking the earth--nature poetry is out! Gwen McEwan is out-dated too, as is the best of Ondaatje's oeuvre. Does this mean I can never can never confess anything in a poem but my intellect? no love no sex no rage no (goddess forbid) joy?

What followed was my most commented-upon FB thread ever, with many people weighing in on Canadian poetics and Russell Smith giving us all a lesson in FB etiquette. It was a very lively discussion, and mirrored the discussion I had with members of the Toronto Women's Writers Salon and with a few women poets, to whom I sent this query:

is Can poetry excelling, or becoming increasingly incomprehensible?

I know this is many conversations about many poetries, not just a quick article about Can Poetry—and I know those conversations are well-detailed and various at Lemon Hound, and Influency, and other places.

I am impressed that Russell thinks poetry is competing w/ major news and pop media . ..  Is he deluded, or does he have a point? Is this article just another example of the boys club expanding, crossing genres? Note that he didn’t mention a single woman: no Chrystakos, no Queyras, no Zolf, no Zed. Well, he did mention Lady Gaga, but I’m not sure if she counts when it comes to Can poetry.

But I also find it interesting that he characterizes all the ‘past’ of Can poetry as weepy and folksy and nature-y. As if even the dynamic new world of poetry doesn’t come from a tradition. And as if intellectual poetry cannot address the natural world. Must it be one thing or the other? Is more intellectual poetry REALLY more highbrow and international? Someone will need to tell Don McKay and Bringhurst that nature poetry is definitely ‘out’.

And what to do with this manuscript of confessional/political/landscape poetry?

BC poet and lit prof Nancy Holmes had this, tongue in cheek, to say about the article:

What a strange article.  Yes, the all male cast, as usual.  And weirdly, what makes poems popular is you can “vote” on them like American Idol!  Whooppee – and read poems while you surf for Lady Gaga and horrors in the middle east—isn’t it great that poetry is right up there with great stuff like that- real entertainment!  THAT’s the kind of poetry experience I’ve always dreamed of!  In fact, a good dose of a barely grammatical conglomeration of words makes me long for a good stiff Lady Gaga video. 

And there is the question of what this young fellow actually used to read in his youth.  Prize-winning poems back then were supposedly about the aurora borealis  and great noble pioneer sorrows  My goodness, did he read his grandmother’s “Poesy to Warm the Heart?” volumes?  The poor deprived fellow.  And I got to read that weepy Margaret Atwood, that folksy Michael Ondaatje.   And that grandmotherly Lorna Crozier writing those quaint odes to the penis and clitoris, and that poor old geezer Rober Kroetsch revolutionizing in his folksy, quaint little way that sweet little Canadian prairie long poem.  Thank god we have stern, impatient editors to flay us into a creolized, vibrant and intricate stream of media garble and purge us with that long manly single hand (or dare I say finger)  of Carmine Starnino.

And this from Margaret Chrystakos, Canadian poet and educator:

russell did run one of the most active poetry series in toronto for several years at the idler pub. It was in the 90s and many of us read there. he was well aware of the scene back then. I don't imagine he's been very conected to it over the last 10 years, i have no idea why he chose to shape his column toward valorizing carmine. carmine's facebook post extended the notion that very particular editors have powerfully imprinted this move toward a now mostly british commonwealth intellectualism that mashes heterogeneous dictive fields together. russell was writing a column that tried to be attentive to poetry gaining audience but it was so poorly argued that only sleazy implications came through.

And Sina Queyras, of Lemonhound website, just retweeted her tweet about the Globe and Mail columnist who discovered Canadian poetry. A real Christopher Columbus! Maybe next week he'll discover women!

Russell and I had an email exchange as well, in which he agreed with some of the Salonistas, that these discussions couldn't always be about gender. Just as certain discussions shouldn't always be about race. But I countered: we can never get away from gender and race, particularly when we are talking about any kind of media representation or lack thereof. See CWILA (Canadian women in the Literary Arts) and Lemonhound, for excellent analyses of how poorly represented women's books are in the reviewing and critical culture, and you know that gender is still a big issue, even for 'the educated people' and I use that term loosely . . .
I

Of course I am happy about all the changes in Burma . . .

. . .  in fact, over two years ago, with the 'bogus' election, I suggested that even a rigged election let the democratic genie out of the bottle, and that true change was on its way. (And some Burma activists naturally accused me of being too soft on the regime . . .)  OF COURSE I am cheering for all the people I've known and the millions I've never known whose hard political and civic work day in and day out all over that beautiful country is FINALLY coming to some kind of fruition. It is a transformation that they, the Burmese, are making real. Awe-inspiring.

But I still believe that it's important to think critically about the regime, about the power structures still in place, and about what happens in a country with a long legacy of violent oppression. See my Globe and Mail editorial on the newspaper's website or directly below:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/hey-burmese-junta-thanks-for-nothing/article4528004/

So Long, Burmese Junta, thanks for nothing

originally published in the Globe and Mail September 10/12

Dear Military Intelligence Service of Burma, er, Myanmar:

Thank you for sending me a copy of the people who are now off The Black List. Lovely that you actually call it The Black List. You’ve always been so literal, practical and admiring of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We’ve had that in common since we first met in 1996, during those messy protests in Rangoon.

I am honoured to be included in this collection of more than 2,000 names of people who were, until Aug. 28, denied visas to enter Burma.

While it was annoying for me to be refused entry into the Golden Land for a decade, you can imagine how painful it was for Burmese friends and colleagues, some of whom live in exile in Canada, including the indefatigable Alice Khin Saw Win, who used to be Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal physician but now lectures at the University of Alberta, as well as Tin Maung Htoo, San Aung, Cham Toik, Kyaw Moe, Toe Kyi, Thuzar Thant and others who have finally been pardoned for loving their country enough to try to change it for the better. It’s unfortunate, but unsurprising, that they had to offend the dictators in order to do that.

Sorry, former dictators. You know – your old bosses, the generals and other top brass who spent the past 60 years doing a stellar job of destroying Burma’s economy, civil society and once remarkable university and health-care systems. Not to mention killing all those people.

I’m sure you feel nostalgic for the past, as recent as it is. In less than two years, your government has moved from hard dictatorship to quasi-democracy, from prison sentences for uttering Aung San Suu Kyi’s name in public to selling big posters and calendars of her face in the street markets – and yes, she has a seat in parliament now, too. You’ve gone from blanket censorship to real freedom of the press.

But how is it for you on the ground? Sure, the generals filled Swiss bank accounts while the country was under the boot, but you and your little buddies, the taxi-cab and street-corner informers, those who spied on the photocopying shops and infiltrated student groups, the members of that vast network of listeners, whisperers, liars: You all must be suffering.

The most, ah, talented among you were trained to be brutal, but let’s face it, most henchmen are little people. Your job was to frighten, hurt, terrorize, torture. Changes that push the whole country toward democracy must be worrisome. What to do in a country where interrogation and torture are becoming obsolete? How many of you can remain employed?

I know how you feel. I’m also nostalgic for the past. Being on any black list is a thrill for a Western writer, because much of our spare time is devoted to convincing ourselves that we’re still relevant – or even interesting – to the new world order. No, I don’t mean democracy. We’ve had that form of government over here for so long that we often don’t honour its basic tenets, such as telling the truth and respecting those whose opinions differ from our own.

Sorry, I’m getting off topic. I was talking about the new world order: social media. Everyone knows that corporations rule the world’s money, but mind control is always the problem, don’t you agree? Just wait and see how effective the Internet is at managing the “freed” masses. Twitter, Facebook and texting have already rendered large segments of the population incapable of thinking a thought longer than, say, 30 words. Combined with reality TV and a higher standard of living – which will surely come to Burma – this amputated attention span makes it difficult for most people to give a damn about politics.

Anyway, thanks again for your recent note. Friend me if you’re on FB. BTW, I’m curious: How did you get my new address so quickly?

_______

The editors cut out most of my rant about our own de-politicization as North Americans. There was a dig at the Harper government--secretive, closed-door politicking, repeated cuts to vulnerable societal groups (just see our new budget!) as well as a glance at the mud-slinging south of the border as the presidential election campaign revs up. I think satire can hold a lot of rant!