On Selling my Last Chapbook, Non-Parenting Books, and Changing the World

I sold my last chapbook yesterday, about a year since it was released into the world. It got me thinking how ephemeral this type of publication is. As part of a limited edition print run as per all Alfred Gustav chapbooks, I knew this day would come. Someone said to me, “But that’s what makes chapbooks special and one-of-a-kind!” Here today, gone tomorrow. The words offered a smidgen of comfort, though I still feel a bit sad (despite the good hands the book went into!)

I love thinking of where this little book travelled to, such as my friend’s condo in Toronto.

No chance of doing readings with copies for sale; no future poet-friends I could meet and do a book exchange with; no opportunity for ongoing purchases.

I picked up my last two copies from my bookshelf that I’m saving for myself and husband, and the other for our 3-year-old daughter Madeleine. I don’t even have copies for the twins on their way, a phrase I could never have imagined myself writing when drafting the Afterword a few years ago. Nor did I imagine my bio would already be out of date, having moved from Vancouver to Coquitlam last fall. My husband began a drawing of Paris from the European vacation that inspired the poems in our old, bigger rental and finished it in our new, smaller one where it now hangs. You read that right. Our family is almost doubling and we reluctantly downsized because, well, money and, at the time, we had no idea what was coming. Life holds surprises in many forms. As Madeleine likes to say, “We never know.”

Drawing of Paris by Adam Back, 2023.

Can I live with the mystery inherent in her statement as well as she can? What do I make of the recent dream where a voice says, “You can’t have a remote control for your life”? 

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, David Bowie sings. Fall to winter, winter to spring, spring to summer. My daughter refused to walk in snow for her first years and this past winter, built a snowman. Now she goes on hikes to find purple flowers.

View of our Coquitlam street with Port Moody high rises in the distance.

Devils Lake in Mission.

Crocuses burst up from the ground, begging to be noticed. New friendships are starting to show too. We get invited to people’s houses in our city and our kids play together. A boy from daycare gives my daughter her first bouquet of flowers, for Valentines, and her face beams.

First flowers.

We find a church that feels like home. We visit the ER more times this season than my whole life, it seems. We watch blood leave our daughter’s arm as we hold her still with all our might and tears leave us too. I have an out-of-body experience watching this scene unfold as if it were happening in a movie to somebody else. I get the same feeling when I practice-push the double stroller. A doctor waves an ultrasound wand around my stomach every other week monitoring for life, growth, breathing, our ever-switching baby A and baby B. Our daughter practices the letter M on every paper she touches and the bumps go on and on like a heartbeat.

No end to her M’s.

Writing is an act of paying attention and I think gratitude works this way too. I have to work at gratitude (which I often do through writing) because there’s a longer list I could complain about, things that are giving me anxiety or fear, but that’s not where I want to dwell.

From The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy.

The wilds of Coquitlam, i.e. our backyard.

Bless the people who give books to new, or newish parents, that don’t have anything to do with parenting such as this one, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy (HarperCollins 2019). At the same time, it has everything to do with parenting.

BBC made a short film about it in 2022. Here’s the trailer that gives you a further sense of its charm and gentleness.

Bless the simple phrase and picture that hold layers of meaning; books you can read in one sitting and can enter in anywhere, not just the beginning.

Bless my daughter’s bedtime song inspired by Hello Humpback where she sings about the sun falling falling falling on everything, landing on the ground, and then rising each day in the sky. Already there’s an arc to her storytelling, there’s contrast, there’s plot. There’s even a hallelujah. 

(even if it’s broken)

Driving back from Vancouver the other day, she told me she figured out what she wants to do when she gets older. “Fix things.” “What kinds of things?” I ask and then give some examples when she doesn’t say anything. “Like buildings? Or things in people’s houses, like Grandpa does? Or perhaps fix broken systems…?” I tentatively offer the latter, not having a clue how to explain it if she were to question further. But she doesn’t. After a pause, she responds, “systems” and then adds, “Because I don’t want to get calluses on my hands like Grandpa.”

What broken systems will she fix? How will she change the world?

Someone on Twitter asked, “Does it bother you to know you aren’t going to change the world?” I replied, “Yes. But if I think of ‘the world’ as my kids’ lives and others close to me, maybe that’s enough, even more than enough.” 

I wasn’t trying to pass the buck or be sentimental. It’s a fine line between realism and cynicism and I don’t want to cross over. I wrote an essay after university about all the practical and wonderful ways my friends and siblings are changing the world and I wondered where I fit in with my words. It’s a bit facile and yet I still have that question. I also have two life-sized question marks flipping in my belly and I am very, very tired.

I often think of the lines, ”I want to change the world. Instead I sleep” from this Ingrid Michaelson song and I appreciate the honesty and humanity in her lyrics.

I’ve often thought I should do a post about sights in Coquitlam or Port Moody that match my architextural vision—I’ve lived here half a year now and my blog has nothing to show for it. While I’ve done some physical exploring, most of it has happened internally. The best way I can explain it is with this:

None of this Belongs to Me

Before we had to move, I had heard of Ellie Sawatzky’s debut poetry collection None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions, 2021) and was intrigued by the title. 

I interpreted it like a confession, and I sensed sadness and loss.

When I visited Toronto in May right after the landlord put “our” house in Vancouver up for sale, that house was almost the only thing on my mind. Language is slippery. It was our house but it was also not ours. It took visiting Toronto to write a poem about what we were losing in Vancouver. The idea of ownership (what actually belongs to me? what can I call mine?) haunted me. Sawatzky’s title returned. None of this belongs to me.

When I heard she was giving a poetry reading at Massy Arts this past September, I was determined to go and finally buy the book from the author herself (provided I liked what I heard, and I did).

In her collection, I found coming-of-age poems, ex-boyfriend poems, Kenora (Ontario) poems where the author grew up, Vancouver poems where the author lives, vacation poems, and work poems.

My favourite section of the book (where the book’s title comes from) are these “work” poems that offer vignettes of the speaker’s role as a nanny looking after a three-year-old girl called “B.”

Take these lines from the poem “Nounou” that also relate to language:

I sit with B in her kitchen, discuss
a Safeway bouquet
of lilies. I say lis. B says

Maman accidentally. 

None of this belongs
to me.

That twinge of sadness and loss is amplified in “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” where Sawatzky writes: “The first girl just wants something to belong to her…”

While the book covers multiple subjects, the connecting thread of “playing a part” was most evident for me. Playing the part of mother, of adult, of being responsible. The joy in reading the book was discovering what “this” in the title refers to. The lines quoted above make it explicit—“B” doesn’t belong to the speaker, but there are many other examples of what doesn’t belong to her throughout the collection. 

Adulthood, with all its revelations, loneliness, and losses, is another one. 

B doesn’t know

she won’t always be a child,
the way I didn’t know I’d be

thrust into this thistle-stitched
ditch of adulthood.

-“Ouroboros”

I love the assonance of those short ‘i’s, echoing the narrowness of a ditch, as well as the spitty awkwardness of those “th” and “ch” consonants that suit the thorny journey to adulthood.

On a road trip at 24 with her parents, Sawatzky writes in “Recalculating”:

In the silence now
we’re all adults and no one knows

what’s best.

And in “What Blue”:

With Grandfather dead,
we are three single women, sisters, girls, absorbing

the mysteries of the world comparing blues.

These are poignant lines, but there is also humour and sass in Sawatzky’s writing, like in “Blessings Upon U and Ur Bullshit” that she dedicates to her neighbour “who threatened / to have my car towed / bc it was parked in front of / ur house…u’ll understand when ur / a mom u said / u’ll understand / when ur a homeowner / but I won’t / I will never be like u”.

Her house doesn’t belong to her either, and how many other renters can relate to the feeling conveyed in the line “i pay her / so she owns me”?

Sleep doesn’t belong to the speaker anymore when she’s at her father’s bedside in a hospital room in the opening poem. Rob Taylor beautifully analyzes “Overnights at the Hospital” in his Tyee article, “Be Brief and Tell Us Everything.”

A self-conscious voice emerges in some of Sawatzky’s poems. A surprising number are self-referential (I began counting how many have “poem” in the poem) and felt they could have been stronger without this (but I am of the school that doesn’t usually like the fourth wall broken). Sawatzky mentions in this interview with Rob Taylor that she likes playing with expectations of poetry and drawing attention to its process, but I found those poems detracted from her otherwise strong theme.

Sawatzky is at her best when the poem isn’t obvious, when it fades into the background and the reader is left with images and sounds that haunt, punch, linger, explode; when she’s working out what does and doesn’t belong to her and subverts readers’ expectations of girlhood and female desire. The reader might assume someone who wants kids or who does want them but can’t have them would pursue work as a nanny. But not so. In “Crystals,” Sawatzky declares, “I tell my mother I never want kids.”

By the end of the collection, I notice a movement from naming and/or lamenting what doesn’t belong to her towards claiming what does belong to her…even the unpleasant parts one doesn’t like to admit.

In “Self-Portrait as Ostrich,” the second-last poem, she sounds the most vulnerable and mature:

I do dream regularly
that I’m gathering eggs

And I thought it was because I used
to look after children

Or because I’ve rewatched
Fly Away Home

so many times and maybe that’s true
but maybe also

I’m finally taking responsibility for me
Anger has a shape too

Ditto shame ditto pride when it unfurls
when I rise

Up off my knees to become
the biggest bird alive

Here is a speaker who accepts she doesn’t have it figured out (“maybe that’s true”) and holds numerous possibilities out in her hand like seed for a bird, not sure which one will take. But the uncertainty doesn’t shrivel, paralyze, or keep her on her knees. Rather, it emboldens her to the extent that she stands up to become “the biggest bird alive.”

Coming out of (and soon approaching another) season of uncertainty, as is the way life ebbs and flows, None of this Belongs to Me felt like a gift at the right time. I am prone to anger too, prone to complaining about life not being fair (and yes, the old adage who said life was fair? always plays in my mind in response), and there is a sisterhood, so to speak, in Sawatzky’s words and in the kind message she wrote in my copy of her book:

Sending care as you settle into your new space. Hope you enjoy the familiar and strange in these poems.

I have been so focussed on our old house, our old city, what we lost and left behind (and there is a season for mourning) but I think it is now time for me to look ahead, not only for myself but for the sake of my child, who very much belongs to me even as she simultaneously does not belong to me. Oh language, oh the paradox of both/and.

The future is as it always was, a quivering
night lit occasionally by lightning. World
without end.

-“Matrilineal”

The Writing on the Wall

After nine years in Vancouver, I am saying goodbye. This is the city where I moved to in my mid 20s, single and living in an apartment all to myself for the first time, freelance writing by the corner window and loving it. 

The golden hour at Fremlin St & 70th Ave

It’s where I looked for poems and found them on skyscrapers, rocks, streets, chairs, gravestones, and strangers who stopped.

Vancouver Novel by João Loureiro at Point Grey Road and Collingwood St

Echoes by Michel Goulet at Kits Beach

Children’s rock artwork along the Arbutus Greenway

Where I had an amazing job for one and a half years at Regent College and felt the strong welcome and support of that community. Where I met a man who asked good questions, including the unforgettable, life-altering one, “Will you marry me?” 

Reader, I said yes.

Where I made new friends who feel old now, like they’ve always been around.

Where my almost 3-year-old daughter took her first breaths, cries, laughs, steps, and lessons in being alive. She’s learning there is beauty and joy and delight in the world but also pain and sadness and uncertainty. Why is the landlord selling our house? Once the landlord sells it, can we come back and live in it? Why is someone else moving into our home? But where will we live?

She, like my husband, asks good questions. Questions I don’t usually have good answers for. Adam and I have been asking a lot of our own this season: Why is Vancouver (actually most of the Lower Mainland) so unaffordable? Why does it seem to do nothing about its housing crisis? Does it not care that so many people, particularly families, are forced to leave?

Granville Island

I think of Maggie Smith and her ever resonant poem “Good Bones.” “I am trying / to sell them the world,” she says about her children, like any new parent. What memories will Madeleine tell of Vancouver, of our house near the park with the wild garden out front?

Shortly after moving into that Marpole apartment, I walked the neighbourhood and saw my name on a building. My name’s not terribly common, so this stood out to me. So much so I wrote a whole blog post about it. It was my welcome message to Vancouver, saying I belong.

After months of searching for a new place to live, applying for 20+ co-ops, viewing 11+ places around Metro Vancouver, lining up with 40+ people stretching the length of a city block to view an apartment that charged for a parking spot each month and didn’t even have bike storage, encountering more than one Craigslist scam and landlords who don’t take good care of what they own, I am relieved to say Adam and I have found a new home we like in a city we didn’t expect, but one I hope to love in different ways than I have loved Vancouver.

somewhere along Main St

The day we drove to look at the place, Adam pointed out an inscription on a concrete barrier at the corner of Lougheed Highway and Pitt River Road: WE LOVE YOU CHARLENE. I suspected it was to mark the site of a tragic car accident, and that sadly is the case. But it stayed with me, just like the Marpole sign did. Because how often is your name written into the landscape? Not only that, but written in stone? 

I, like my daughter, am sad (mixed with other emotions) at all that we are leaving in Vancouver, but this unexpected message—so personal, so intimate—felt like a direct welcome to Coquitlam. You belong here now. 

Time to step through a different door. Goodbye shiny Vancouver.

Risky Rainbow Play

I thought I would be the type of parent who would take my kid on public transport frequently. That by her almost 3 years of age, she would have ridden the bus at least once or twice. Would know what the yellow rope was for, would know to say thank you upon exiting. Would be familiar with the screeching brakes of the SkyTrain or the incessant beeps of Compass cards tapping in and out.

COVID kept my daughter off the bus these past couple years and it wasn’t until today that she got her wish of riding one. She’s been singing “The Wheels on the Bus” since God knows how long and now she could finally be one of the people going “up and down.” She gripped the bars of her stroller like she was riding the wooden roller coaster at the PNE and kept asking as her head scanned the occupied blue seats, “Why are there so many people?”

Our destination was the newly opened park at Smithe and Richards streets downtown: sθәqәlxenәm ts’exwts’áxwi7 in the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ and Squamish languages, meaning “Rainbow” park. The City of Vancouver’s website says this is the first park to be gifted a name by the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations.

sθәqәlxenәm ts’exwts’áxwi7, meaning ‘rainbow’, was chosen for this place because the land where the park now sits was once forested with large trees and had many sources of water, including a marsh where the sun and mist would form rainbows.

I see the “rainbow” element integrated into the design of the playground through the multi-textured walkways that wrap around and over the park, with wheelchair accessible routes too. These walkways imitate rainbows that arch over the kids playing below. I was standing on one while I took this pic of my daughter bouncing on one of the two trampolines. The Indigenous public art banners waving in the wind echo this rainbow effect, adding height and colour to an already variegated landscape.

There are a lot of cookie cutter playgrounds in Vancouver (and probably any city) but this is not one of them. Its varying heights, structures, and integration into the streetscape caught my attention right away. Here is a park that promotes risky play, that considers parents as much as the kids, that offers a little something for everyone.

In researching risky play (which I am a fan of though it can scare me!), I came across this video that traces the history of “adventure playgrounds” that were originally known as “junk playgrounds” that began in Denmark in the aftermath of WWII. It’s fascinating.

The video gives 6 criteria that typically categorize an adventure playground:

• heights
• speed
• tools
• dangerous elements
• rough-and-tumble play
• the ability to disappear or become lost

While there were no tools or dangerous elements like hammers, nails, or loose bricks for kids to manipulate, this “Rainbow” park definitely contains the other criteria. You can tell it was equally designed for parents and caregivers by putting in a nearby coffee shop (Kafka’s) and wooden seating around the edges (with backrests!) that indicates parents stay on the perimeter while the centre area is for the kids (something the video discusses as well). That being said, the park is so inviting it’s hard for adults to stay on the edges, as evidenced by the daddy-daughter photo below (my family).

Freeform sculptures (some with footholds, others not) invite creative climbing and sliding. And you can only reach the top of these staggeringly high towers by climbing from the bottom all the way to the top. Sure, an adult could go up it but our bodies don’t fit through those holes as easily! Our daughter wasn’t interested in climbing these but she loved the lower slide, the roller slide, and the trampolines. Different structures appeal to different age groups, and to me, that’s a mark of a good playground when a variety of ages can enjoy it. And let’s not underestimate the simple power of a good hill to climb or ramp to run down. I saw children playing tag along the walkways and others in the spray pool cooling off.

If you’re in the Vancouver area and looking for other examples of adventure playgrounds, I’d recommend Terra Nova Rural Park in Richmond (the closest I can think of to the adventure playground model) and Douglas Park in Vancouver.

Do you have a favourite risky playground where you live or where you’ve visited? Would love to know of other examples!

A Brick Lover’s Toronto

I recently travelled for the first time since Covid—a solo trip to Toronto to celebrate my first year of motherhood (in a pandemic no less). It’s been two of both now but Covid got in the way of going earlier.

As someone who attended university in Ottawa, I had been to Toronto a few times on weekend trips and it was fun but not particularly inspiring. The destination of this trip actually wasn’t that important to me. What was more important was having a much-needed getaway (I am inclined to urban spaces) and seeing and staying with an old friend I hadn’t seen in several years.

Brick houses in Cabbagetown.

But the destination surprised me. It was so much older and beautiful than I remembered. I found myself enchanted with all the brick houses, taking picture after picture because they were all so beautiful and different and teeming with character. Coming from the West Coast where our building materials are wood and glass (Douglas Coupland nicknamed Vancouver the “City of Glass,” and it was only incorporated in 1886), there was something comforting about the solidity and permanency of brick. I wish I could call one of these houses mine.

Such love in the details here. And that red door! Cabbagetown neighbourhood.

The symmetrical, two-pronged staircase leading to the blue door is perfection. Also in Cabbagetown.

Yet another lovely duplex in Cabbagetown.

View from my friend’s condo in the Annex. It was not uncommon to see turrets. Turrets, folks!

Of course there were also turrets on Casa Loma.

Housing was on my mind as my husband and I had just learned that our landlord was about to sell the beloved house that we rent the top floor of in Vancouver. We’ve been there for three years and were hoping to have been there a lot more. Now we’ll have two months from date of sale to find a new home.

Looking back through my photos of the Art Gallery of Ontario, I noticed how many were paintings of houses and rooftops. Definitely a theme here.

A wall of Lawren S. Harris paintings in the Thomas Collection. Left: Houses, Richmond Street, 1911, oil on canvas. Top middle: Street Scene with Figures, Hamilton, 1919, oil on wood-pulp board. Bottom middle: In the Ward, Toronto, 1917, oil on wood-pulp board.

Maximilien Luce, Gisons, The Cathedral, 1897, oil on paper mounted to canvas.

These two women beside each other in the AGO also caught my eye: Saint Anne with the Christ Child (c.1645-1650) by Georges de la Tour on the left and Melancholy (c.1627) by Hendrick ter Brugghen on the right, which purportedly depicts Mary Magdalene. They look like they could have been painted by the same artist. The works share so many similarities: dramatic late-night scenes illuminated by a single candle, two women with downcast eyes thinking and feeling deeply. They face each other, as if they are made to converse about life and death. I wrote a poem about the two women the next day at First & Last Coffee. The weather was delightfully warm enough in early May that I could enjoy their wonderful patio space.

One of my hopes for the trip was to have some quiet time wandering, reflecting, and writing. I headed to Toronto’s Necropolis, because just like Vancouver’s cemetery has inspired many a poem, I thought this picturesque Toronto cemetery could too.

Entrance to the Necropolis, featuring a Victorian Gothic chapel.

The most recognizable monument in the Necropolis. Jack Layton’s wife Olivia Chow created this bronze bust.

The Necropolis is one of the city’s oldest cemeteries, established in 1850. It sits to the west of the Don Valley Parkway, which is shown in this painting below by William Kurelek that my friend and I saw the day before at the AGO. We spent at least half an hour trying to find the hidden crucifix near the edge of the trees. We gave up and googled it instead.

William Kurelek, Don Valley on a Grey Day, 1972, mixed media on hardboard.

I also took a pilgrimage to Knife Fork Book, a poetry dispensary located in Capital Espresso on Queen Street and picked up some reading material for later.

Street art of…houses, what else?

As someone drawn to architecture and its endless forms, I found Toronto inspiring after all.

O Toronto!

Nathan Phillips Square with the Romanesque-style Old City Hall in the background.

Spadina Museum (a Victorian mansion) near Casa Loma.

One of many old stone buildings on U of T’s campus.

St. Michael’s Cathedral.

Old meets new in the Daniels Building for U of T’s architecture, landscape, and design program.

When I posted some of my pictures on Facebook, a friend commented, “Who knew Toronto could be so beautiful?” Indeed, who knew?

Historic home of Daniel Lamb, business man, City Father, a founder of Toronto’s first zoo, 1842-1920.

And for those curious, I do have a poem in the works that combines my love of Victorian houses with my interest in cemeteries and my surprise appearance in Jack Layton’s Ottawa rental before he was Leader of the Opposition. Strange what memories and alignments a trip might spark and a poem might allow.

Running to Not Forget

When I run, I go to Mountain View Cemetery. I love seeing how it changes, how it stays the same when the world around me is so precarious.

When I returned home last Saturday, my toddler announced, “Mommy, when I get bigger and older, I want to run through a cemetery.” I laughed.

Little does she know she’s been here many times as a baby. I wrote a poem about the experience of walking through here with her two years ago as the world was on edge, COVID “sweeping the world / like my father in a game of Risk.”

That military image feels devastatingly apt right now as I run past gravestones and think of Ukraine. All the suffering they have endured and are still enduring. All the lives and homes lost. All the loss. The horrific war crimes the Russian army has committed in Ukraine, particularly against women and children, has shaken me. One of the questions I keep circling back to: “Where does all that hurt go? What does a country like Ukraine do with all that grief/rage/trauma?” I don’t have answers.

I recently read an interview with Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska in Vogue. When asked what can ordinary citizens do to help Ukrainians, she says:

The main thing is not to get used to the war—not to turn it into statistics. Continue going to protests, continue to demand that your governments take action. 

I suppose running and praying through a cemetery is one way I don’t get used to the war. There is death all around me here, including death from war. I notice how young the men are in the numerous memorials throughout the cemetery, many of them younger than me.

But I also run through the cemetery because there are signs of life all around me too: from cherry blossom trees to blooming heather, from freshly cut flowers to surprising gravestone offerings like big, juicy oranges. I need these reminders lately.