Blog Archives

PAINTING: ADAM GUNN

1/31/2020

ISLAND OF THE DEAD

Rise of the Island of the Dead (2019)
Oil on wood panel, 17 X 19 inches (irregular dimensions)

After the photo Earth Rise (1968) taken by William Anders, crew of the Apollo 8 mission. Earth Rise is often attributed as being a photograph that contributed immensely to modern environmental awareness. It is predated by black and white photographs taken by an unmanned lunar orbiter two years prior, but it was the blue of the earth taken in Ander’s photo that resonated with millions of people. That brilliant blue contrasts with the dead grey of the lifeless moon and the stark black of the surrounding nothingness, emphasizing the jewel-like fragility of our own world.

Island of the Dead (2019)
Oil on wood panel, 23.5 X 23.5 inches (irregular dimensions)

After the photo Blue Marble (1972) taken by the crew of the Apollo 17 mission.

Rückenfigur (2019)
Oil on wood panel, 34 X 27 inches (irregular dimensions)

After Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818). Friedrich’s painting is often used to represent the Romanticism movement and the sublime. Romanticism was in part a reaction to the industrial revolution marked by a nostalgia for an untouched natural world and a reverence for its overwhelming power. Ironically the spread and continuation of that industrialism is predicted to set in motion a new overpowering version of nature that does not include us. The original painting uses Rückenfigur; a compositional technique with a figure seen from behind contemplating a view before them. In this painting there is no figure; the future view of a dead world is instead seen from behind in time.

Garden of Earthly Remains (2019)
Oil on wood panel, 21 X 60 inches (irregular dimensions)

After Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 -1510). The five structures in this painting are based off the ones from the center panel of Bosch’s triptych painting. That painting suggests a moral warning about the consequences of a humanity let loose to act without boundaries. In my painting all the abundance of life and wild humanity from that center panel are gone with only the structures remaining.

Island of the Dead - Artist Statement

This work is focused on a scientific prediction of a change in the colour of the sky and oceans as a result of climate change. I came across this theory through the writings of Professor of Paleontology and Biology at Washington University, Peter Ward. He describes how in the past an increase in carbon dioxide has led to anoxic oceans where hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria altered the chemistry of the environment so that the oceans became purple and the sky became green. I first encountered this scientific prediction in Tim Flannery’s book about the urgent need for climate change action, Now or Never. He quotes Ward from his book Under a Green Sky where he describes a vision of a dead ocean and poisonous sky:

Look out on the surface of the great sea itself, and as far as the eye can see there is a mirrored flatness, an ocean without whitecaps. Yet that is not the biggest surprise. From shore to the horizon, there is but an unending purple colour – a vast, flat oily purple, not looking at all like water. . . The colour comes from a vast concentration of purple bacteria. . . At last there is motion on the sea, yet it is not life, but antilife. Not far from the fetid shore, a large bubble of gas belches from the viscous oil slick-like surface. . . It is hydrogen sulphide, produced by green sulphur bacteria growing amid their purple cousins. There is one final surprise. We look upward, to the sky. High, vastly high overhead, there are thin clouds existing far in excess of the highest clouds found on our Earth. They exist in a place that changes the very colour of the sky itself. We are under a pale green sky, and it has the smell of death and poison.

As a painter, this change in colour of the world’s landscapes captivated me. The blue of the sky and oceans seems to have always been and as if it always will be. This new colour pallet for the world will be sublime, strange and beautiful, but there will likely be no one around left to see it. Approaching climate change in painting through this change in colour is a phenomenological way to know an issue that is often hard for people to feel convinced of except as an abstract theory. I first came to this subject while working in Berlin last Winter and Spring. I spent a lot of time in Europe visiting museums and seeing historical paintings and contemplating my relationship to them and their relationship to today and came to specifically consider their associations to the environment and climate change. From that research I made a series of paintings referencing historical paintings and images, setting them in that future of purple oceans and green skies predicted by Ward.

Adam Gunn is a painter whose work focuses on interests in ideas about natural and unnatural orders with a deep concern for how an image is brought into being. He was both formed and grown in Nova Scotia and currently dwells in Montreal. He has accumulated an MFA from Concordia University and a BFA from NSCAD University. He’s been semi-finalist in the RBC Canadian Painting Competition twice, and recently completed a 5-month residency in Berlin as part of the Nancy Petry Award.

VISUAL POETRY: SACHA ARCHER

1/26/2020

TREE SKETCHES

Silver Maple. Acer sacchcirinum. 45 min. 23.05.16

Weeping Willow. Salix babylonica. 90 min. 25.05.16

Scotch Elm. Ulmas glabra. 20 min. 03.06.16

Tea Crabapple. Malus hupehensis. 45 min. 11.06.16

Cucumber Magnolia. Magnolia acuminate. 180 min. 12.06.16

Tree Sketches were each composed by a different species of tree. As a writer, connected to story, I felt it a salient action in this time of environmental crisis to step back and listen to the subjects I might otherwise have written over.

Each caption includes the species of trees, both common and Latin names, as well as the duration and date of each composition.

Tree Sketches # 1 & 3 were originally published by The Blasted Tree in 2017 as a series of broadsides, while the remaining works are presented on its website, all of them presented under the title The Sign of Poetry.

Sacha Archer is a writer who works in numerous mediums as well as being the editor of Simulacrum Press. Archer’s most recent publications include Inkwells: An Event Poem (Noir:Z, 2019), TSK oomph (Inspiritus Press, 2018) and Contemporary Meat (The Blasted Tree, 2018). Houses (No Press), Framing Poems and Mother’s Milk (both Timglaset) are forthcoming. Archer lives in Burlington, Ontario with his wife and two daughters.

https://www.instagram.com/sachaarcher/
https://www.facebook.com/sacha.archer
https://sachaarcher.wordpress.com

POETRY: KIM FAHNER

1/26/2020

READING THE MURMURATIONS

In the end times, they say,
the birds might silence themselves,
drop feathers as hints, molt at odd times,
and mate with their fiercest rivals.

But the days will arrive
without warning–
no bells rung with symbolism,
no trumpet voluntary flourish,
no drums rolling attendant.

They will have already arrived,
these muted and too quiet days,
dressed in common clothing
and pretending to fit in–
silencing mothers and lovers
as they come, trailing catastrophe
in their muddied wake.

Kim Fahner was the fourth poet laureate for the City of Greater Sudbury (2016-18), and was the first woman appointed to the role. Her latest book of poems is These Wings (Pedlar Press, 2019). She is a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the Writers’ Union of Canada, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim blogs fairly regularly at kimfahner.wordpress.com and can be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com

POETRY: SÂKIHITOWIN AWÂSIS

1/25/2020

to cope

it’s all unseasonal rains
winter in the Great Lakes these days
in niibin the boreal is ablaze
the amazon and outback aflame
increasing tsunamis and earthquakes
and all we can do is yell CLIMATE CHANGE
what else do we say?
while the US keeps taking brown babies away
numbered like the West Bank
Bantustans
Japanese internment camps
Auschwitz
the Indian act

our migration routes are older than your borders
we have cultural items older than your legal orders

this is natural law renaissance
embodying ancestors’ excellence
bringing land back
on ready when RCMP attack

Unist’ot’en bimaadiziwin
resistance is a way of living

Sâkihitowin Awâsis is a Michif Anishinaabe two-spirit water protector, geographer, and spoken word artist from the pine marten clan. She has contributed poetry to Forever Loved: Exposing the Hidden Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada, Red Rising Magazine, kimiwan ‘zine, and Introducing Atrocities Against Indigenous Canadians for Dummies. She is continually inspired by acts of decolonization, Indigenous resurgence, and community resistance. Follow @awan.ikwe.

POETRY: EMILY LU

1/25/2020

SCREAMING INTO A PIANO

… The pictures captured a mood of as much astonishment as joy; it was as if the delegates could not quite believe they had succeeded in reaching an agreement of such significance.
- Amitav Ghosh

Recalling decision 1 / CP.17 on the establishment of a room
wide enough to hold your imagining. Like the moon
fallen onto the field, new
& mistaken by my aunt for a spaceship. Also recalling
relevant decisions to respond to everything by screaming.
Rain lines. Parts per million diluted
light. Each acre along this river
& if there are still children blowing tufts int o
forg
iv e n
e s
s

Welcoming
the adoption of planned repairs for the south
entrance north alley west gate. Recognizing that
even in crossing towards it I would stubbornly
remain a parallel incident. Reimagining no one
there. Back bicycle wheel spinning
hillside. Throwing the moon.
Acknowledging that agreeing to uphold & promote
revisions ought to be enough
this time. Singing.

"Screaming into a Piano" previously appeared in a chapbook Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press Oct 2019)

Emily Lu earned her B.Sc. at the University of Toronto and her M.D. at Queen’s University. Currently completing her postgraduate training in psychiatry, she lives in London, Ontario. Night Leaves Nothing New (Baseline Press) is her first chapbook.

PHOTOGRAPHY: KEVIN ADONIS BROWNE

1/24/2020

THE COAST

The aesthetics of environmental erasure—of what goes, what remains, and what is brought back to us on the tide.

Kevin Adonis Browne is a Caribbean American photographer, writer, and speaker. His award-winning visual and written work exist at the intersection of fine art, documentary, street photography, creative nonfiction, and memoir in what he calls: A discourse on the legacies of light as a way to understand the poetics of Caribbean culture.”

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, he attended Presentation College in the southern city of San Fernando. In 1990, he emigrated to the United States, settling in the Bronx and Brooklyn. In 2003, he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in English at Medgar Evers College (CUNY) in Brooklyn, later earning a Master of Arts in English in 2006 and a PhD in English in 2009 from The Pennsylvania State University. He has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Syracuse University, and Bentley University. In 2017, he returned to Trinidad and Tobago, where he teaches at the University of the West Indies (St. Augustine). He is co-founder of the Caribbean Memory Project and is the author of two books: Tropic Tendencies: Rhetoric, Popular Culture, and the Anglophone Caribbean (2013) and HIGH MAS: Carnival and the Poetics of Caribbean Culture (2018), which won the prestigious Bocas Prize in Caribbean Literature in 2019. Following a successful launch in the streets of Port of Spain, Trinidad, he has had solo exhibitions in the United States and the United Kingdom.

FICTION: CARLEIGH BAKER

1/20/2020

LAST WOMAN

I’ve been playing a video game. Post-apocalyptic—post-geomagnetic disaster, in fact—which sounds like something that would melt people. The woman in the video game is the last person on Earth, and has to stay alive. And let me tell you, she didn’t win the goddamn lottery on that front. She’s in the far north—Yukon, I think. Miles and miles of forest, snow, wolves, bears. She has limited supplies, but at least there’s no one to fight over them. Silver lining. Also, there’s a deep, deep silence, which seems nice.

“Things are quiet now. But you won’t believe how quickly the world came apart,” she says. She doesn’t say if anyone melted.

In the mornings, I make a half Bodum of tar-coffee and crawl back into bed. I eat in bed. I’m not proud of this. There’s a tiny table in the corner of the cabin, but I don’t like eating there, and I love bed. Some days I write a little. Or read. Most days I just play. I haven’t played a video game in a long time, but this one seems tailor made for me. I like solitude. Writers like solitude. Modern women without husbands or kids are supposed to be all about solitude. I’m a modern woman, who runs toward adventure with open arms. I moved to Galiano Island three months ago to write, and work weekends at the bookstore. That gives me five days a week alone. And by alone I mean alone. My cabin is on an acreage surrounded by deep forest, and although the owners live on the property too, I never see them. The locals are friendly, but it’s that usual island thing. I’m a foreigner. Worse, a mainlander. People are waiting to see if I’ll make it through the winter; then they’ll invest in me. Since I can’t write all the time, and I have no social life, and I really can’t afford to spend every day drunk, a video game feels like the responsible choice. And a video game about survival is even better. Modern women are all about surviving.

The last woman on Earth ate some bad fish last night, so she’s in bed today, too. She had a better sleep than me, a solid six hours, but I seem to be weathering a little bout of insomnia. I bet if I was burning a zillion calories a day staying alive, I’d sleep better, too. She has to stay in bed and take antibiotics, which, since I have the game on easy mode, are plentiful. But if anything happens while she can’t get out, if she runs out of water or tinder or something, she might still bite it. Then you have to start a brand new game. No second chances.

We while the day away together, she with a snowstorm howling outside, me with the patter of rain on my tin roof. Once she’s healed up and the snow stops, she goes fishing. Walks across a frozen lake and cracks a hole in the ice with a hatchet. I wonder how hard that would be to do in real life.

There’s no cell service at my cabin. Not for five kilometres in any direction—a mid-island dead zone. The internet is reasonably good in the early morning, if I sit close to the wall. On those days I can call my parents using Google (the video chat sucks too much bandwidth) but we still get cut off a lot. Every time the connection breaks I feel like throwing my laptop across the room.

But it’s not the laptop’s fault. It’s the only source of any voice other than my own. Although I know it’s terrible sleep hygiene, I fall asleep most nights with it open in my face. I’ve killed the woman in the game a couple of times that way. She died of exposure while I slept. She’s kind of like a pet. A Tamagotchi.

I’m playing the sandbox alpha, because story mode isn’t ready yet. In story mode she’d have goals, places to go, but in sandbox she just runs around and collects stuff. In easy mode, the wildlife doesn’t attack you, but predators still attack prey animals, so the woman sometimes stumbles across carcasses she can strip. Of course, they freeze if they’ve been out there too long. She can take the hide and gut, too—lays it out to cure on the floor of her cabin. Bet that smells great. Not like she’s expecting company.

Or at least, that’s what I thought. In one of the new game trailers for story mode, the woman expresses her faith that someone is out there. It’s vague, but seems likely that this person is her husband. She believes he’s still alive. She collects wood outside a forest ranger’s lookout, then climbs the stairs to the top. The view would be spectacular if she could see through the fog. She goes inside and lights a fire, boils some water to purify it, cooks a chunk of deer. I wonder if she knew how to light fires without a lighter before the geomagnetic disaster. It’s harder than it looks. In real life I mean, not in the game. My cabin doesn’t have a wood stove but it does have a space heater. Not a great one. Most of the time, I’m in my long johns. Eating in bed. Good thing I’m not expecting company, either.

There is a guy, Sean. Not in the game, in real life. Not here, Vancouver. He’s in Copenhagen right now, and he was in Paris before that. He’s a photographer. This makes him sound pretty cosmopolitan, which I guess he is, but we don’t sit around talking about opera or whatever. I met him on Tinder; we went on a couple of dates, and then I think maybe he ghosted me but I was too busy moving to Galiano to notice. Anyway, I didn’t take it personally. Who could possibly take Tinder personally? But for some reason, he’s been messaging again. He’s been sending me beautiful photos of bookshops, first along the Seine River, and now from a strange little enclave in East Copenhagen.

They don’t allow cameras here, but I took two anyway, he writes me.

Badass, I write back. I’m afraid if I appear too impressed with his flirting, he’ll stop.

He uses Instagram to message me, which is appropriate for a photographer. Sometimes he sends me first person perspective photos of himself holding a cup of mulled wine in a park somewhere. Sean likes his wine. We drank a lot when we dated, which to be honest, was only a few times. I look at the photos and infer the “wish you were here” subtext.

There are no streetlights on the island, which makes the darkness of winter nights absolute. If you live on the water, you can see the glow of the city, but I’m in the forest. There are no predators on the island, but there are a lot of deer. There is also a constant feeling of being watched. I’m not nuts. When I finally admit this feeling to some of the locals, they nod knowingly, though most say it’s probably the deer or raccoons or whatever. But the feeling makes it uncomfortable to be out at night. One night the car I borrow on the weekends to get to the bookstore breaks down, and I have to walk home. I can’t find a flashlight at the store but I do find a lantern. Normally the locals pick me up if I’m walking, but lord only knows what they make of this hooded figure in black, stumbling, half blinded by lantern light. Nobody stops. When I’m only steps from my cabin, on the darkest part of the trail, there’s a rustling in the bushes, and terror takes me right the hell out of my body, so I watch a buck emerge from the trees from a third person point of view. Relief. Embarrassment. My adrenaline reek probably scares him away.

The game woman is cold and hungry. She’s grumbling a little, but otherwise she never says much. She could build a fire in one of the abandoned train cars, but there’s a dam not too far ahead, and she’s got stocks there. Energy bars and crackers and some fish she cooked this morning. When I can, I’ve been keeping her well fed.

I realize I’m hungry, too. I forgot to get groceries last time I had the car. Last night I ate half a block of plain tofu, which obviously didn’t satisfy. It’s weird to be somewhere where there are zero places to buy food after 10 PM. There’s a can of tomato paste and a can of chickpeas in the cupboard. The other half block of tofu in the fridge. Two tea bags, salt, and some cinnamon. I roast the chick peas and brew some tea. A friend from the city calls on Skype while I’m cooking, but the connection is crap so we message instead. I put on a podcast so I can hear a voice. Toss the chickpeas in salt and eat them until I feel sick.

That night I wake to what feels like my bed being shoved across the floor. A light shines in my bedroom window, and I hear a man’s voice outside. Everything shudders again, with a deep groan I’m not sure if I’m hearing or feeling, and some books fall off my shelf. For one moment I really, really think the world is ending, and oh fuck me, I’m going to be alone for it. Then I realize that the voice outside is Ken’s, the man who owns the cabin.

“Everything okay in there?” he calls.

“Yep!” I say, in a croaky voice I barely recognize, before even knowing what he’s talking about. Maybe things aren’t okay. I wonder how he knows about the problem with my bed. Poltergeist? What should I do? I see the flashlight beam retreating back toward’s Ken’s place, should I go get him?

Social Media has the answer. Hundreds of “OMG, DID YOU FEEL THAT EARTHQUAKE?” tweets.

My phone buzzes. You feel that? Sean messages.

Don’t tell me you felt it in Copenhagen?

Got back yesterday. Jetlagged, he replies, with a picture of his dog, Henry, sprawled out on the couch. I packed a bag in case we had to get out. Water, dog food, whiskey.

HA. I assume he’s joking, but he sends me a photo of the packed bag. That’s some good whiskey.

Be prepared, he writes. I try to imagine him as a boy scout.

We message until the light filters through the curtains. I guess he didn’t want to be alone, either.

Sean has blonde hair and pale blue eyes that point in different directions sometimes. In an embarrassing moment of vulnerability I told him they were beautiful, and I meant it, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. Hard to explain to someone that their imperfections are their best assets. His attractiveness, like anyone I’ve been attracted to, lies in his emotional detachment—he was always happy to see me, but only so happy. Also, he talks about weird stuff. The first thing he brought up on our first date, in a hip Gastown bar with a Yeah Yeah Yeahs soundtrack, was the super-deluxe robo-toilets they have in the Tokyo airport. I don’t even remember if he had a segue between “nice to meet you,” and that. After I recovered from the initial concern about what other people might think of the conversation, I realized I loved it. One of his eyes drifted toward the roof, while the other looked at me intently. Then he showed me his photos of a group of Japanese guys who dress up like rockabilly dudes and challenge each other to dance-offs in a park outside Tokyo. Sean loves Japan. I think he was disappointed to learn I haven’t travelled much.

Once, when I was reading him one of my stories on his rooftop deck, overlooking downtown, he snapped a picture of me. That seemed to me like high intimacy. He didn’t show me the photo and I didn’t ask. The sun was setting and we’d had so much gin.

No food again. Not in the game, in real life. It’s an hour long walk to the store. A modern woman would walk to the store. I check Google Maps three times, to see if there’s a faster way to get there, some secret trails through the forest. It’s only about a kilometre away as the crow flies. But I’m not a crow. In the video game, crows circle the bodies of fresh killed deer. Ravens, I guess, since it’s the Yukon. I wonder how the animals made it through the geomagnetic disaster, but then I realize I have no idea what a geomagnetic disaster actually is. Google it.

Turns out it wouldn’t melt anyone, which is a shame. But it would knock out all the electricity, which would totally kill most people these days. A very un-sciencey website called Business Insider claims that in 2012, a huge solar storm sent out an energy wave that almost hit Earth. If we'd been in the storm’s path, we would have been hit by a solar flare, (amazing!) and then a coronal mass ejection, (who can we thank for this catastrophe nomenclature!) Billions of tons of hot, electrically charged atoms of hydrogen and helium would have been our conquerors. It sounds terrifying, but I guess besides a really bright light, people on Earth wouldn’t actually see it happening. That might make it even scarier.

I wonder how the woman in the game survived. Maybe she was one of those people who don’t have a smart phone. Those people still exist, though there are fewer and fewer of them. What if she is the only person left because she didn’t have a smart phone?

I decide to walk to the store. It takes a lot of preparation. There’s clothing considerations—it’s cold, but I’ll heat up quickly. So, layers. And then of course there’s me. I’m a disaster. Pale, sickly, dirty hair—I can’t remember the last time I washed it. My cabin only has a bathtub, and washing long hair in the tub is the shits. Something’s wrong with the water, it’s kind of yellow and smells like sulphur. “Not poisonous,” Ken says. Great. But still, I’m never really clean. Fortunately, Galiano is an aesthetically forgiving community. I put on my glasses over bleary, unlined eyes, spend another half hour stressing about which shoes to wear (practical, not aesthetic concerns) and finally, finally, leave.

Outside, everything is winter white frosty. I go back in and get my sunglasses, check Google Maps again, check Facebook again, leave again. Sunbeams everywhere, it’s nuts. After a few steps, the adrenaline-heavy “leaving the house” feeling is replaced with a drunk-ish happiness, some kind of endorphin rush for having granted myself fresh air and blood circulation. I take pictures of the light filtering through crystalline tree branches. I don’t see anyone. The island is long and skinny, and most houses are set away from the road, down long driveways. As a result, the roads seem empty. There’s still the deer, of course. Sometimes, if I look at a deer for too long, I get weepy.

A Galiano raven has cultivated exactly the right acoustics to achieve the Ultimate Haunting Call. Those who have been fortunate enough to experience the UHC in person know that it's not necessarily a mournful cry. If anything, a smug satisfaction at having engineered maximum amplification and reverb through a combination of positioning, air clarity, temperature, and vocal chops, is detectable in the cry. These are the things you start to notice when you spend a lot of time in silence. Outside feels good, less like loneliness, and more like solitude. Buzzfeed says that’s different. I decide to force myself out for a few hours every day.

The woman in the game has found a gun. I don’t know anything about guns besides what I’ve learned from other games, but it’s clearly a shotgun. She finds some ammo, too, in the trunk of a car outside a fishing shack. This means she doesn’t have to wait for the wolves to make her kills for her any more—now she’s got the power. She runs out into a field and the first thing we see is a rabbit, so we shoot it. It screams. She just gets to work on the carcass, like, no big deal—this will make some great mitts. But over here, in real life, my eyes are watering.

Hey, maybe you can come to the island sometime, I message Sean, holding my breath.

Sounds good, he messages back. But that’s it.

The next day, on a misty road that’s presenting me with a seriously pastoral farm landscape, I see a snake. Just a garter snake, no big deal. I used to catch garters when I was a kid and impress the boys with my totally masculine bravery. I loved the feel as they hugged my wrist, coiling themselves around it like they were claiming me. The snakes, not the boys.

As I get closer, I see it’s half squashed. There’s more carnage further along—a couple of flat lizards. The road is a reptile deathtrap. I look away, at the horses in the fields, frosty green beans hanging from a lattice, sun diffusing onto Scotch Broom. It’s chilly, but these genuinely cold spells only last a few days, usually. Still, you’d think the lizards would hibernate in the winter.

And then, an eagle flies overhead and drops a lizard on the ground right in front of me. Alive, but stunned. Both of us. I approach slowly, like it might be a lizard bomb, undetonated. Run a finger across its mottled brown skin and it doesn't move. Pick it up by the tail, crouching low to the ground in case it wiggles out of my grasp, but it doesn't. I walk a long way into the woods, into a half frozen grassy marsh. I can't explain how I know I’ve found the right spot; at a certain point I just stop walking and put the lizard down. Again, that Galiano feeling that someone or something is watching me, like I’m being Punk’d by nature. But maybe that instinct is wrong, not an instinct at all, really. Maybe the opposite of an instinct. A long-time misconception that I’m not a part of all this, Of nature, I mean.

This realization doesn’t come with fireworks or nausea, or anything that might mark a life-changing epiphany. Maybe it’s just cabin fever. I want to sing, which sounds douchey, but I’m so tired of silence. All that comes to mind is a John Trudell poem, so I sing that. Culturally borrowing—hardcore—but hopefully Trudell would forgive me. “Days people don’t care for people. These days are the hardest.”

When the all-season songbirds start to sing along with me, I admit, it feels like a prayer.

The last woman on Earth (maybe) would never indulge herself like this. She doesn’t know it’s almost Christmas day, or if she does, she doesn’t acknowledge it. It’s a day like any other: do some fishing, purify some water, stay alive—none of that other shit matters when you’re the last woman on Earth.

She’s been skinning her kills. She’s been stockpiling the stinking hides and the gut, because she knows the bullets for the gun won’t last forever. Birch saplings will be straight enough for arrows. Maple for a bow. But they have to be dried and hardened, and these things take time.

"Last Woman" originally appeared in the 2017 Hingston & Olsen Short Story Advent Calendar.

Carleigh Baker is an nêhiyaw âpihtawikosisân /Icelandic writer who lives as a guest on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Skwxwú7mesh, and səl̓ilwəta peoples. Her work has appeared in Best Canadian Essays, The Short Story Advent Calendar, and The Journey Prize Stories. She also writes reviews for the Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada. Her debut story collection, Bad Endings (Anvil, 2017) won the City of Vancouver Book Award, and was also a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Emerging Indigenous Voices Award for fiction, and the BC Book Prize Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award. She is the 2019/20 writer in residence and a 2020 Shadbolt fellow in the humanities at Simon Fraser University.

POETRY: FRANCO CORTESE

1/20/2020

“Wailsong 4 Sydney” collects instances of a novel form of found poetry that I call the amput(ransl)ation. First, a random string of alphanumeric characters is typed by hand into Google translate, which misinterprets this string as a legitimate entry in one or another language (often, but not always, recognizing it as Arabic script). Then, one or more characters are iteratively excised from the string, producing a descending sequence of alternate translations, until not much more than a stump is left.

While perusing this form, on January 10th, 2020, in the midst of the Australian bushfire crisis, I happened upon a sequence that spoke of Sydney, Australia, of greenness and heat, of smoke, and of payment. Delving a bit deeper, I identified the sequence in question, and explored various permutations of both the string and the type and order of character excisement, ultimately producing this sequence of found poetry, which serves as a dirgesong for the bushfire crisis currently underway in Australia.

It is typeset here in Australia, an open-source typeface designed by Denver Ross that "takes inspiration from the arches of the Sydney Opera House to the waves of Bondi Beach."

Franco Cortese is an experimental poet living in Thorold, Ontario. His poetry was longlisted for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize and has appeared in Literary Review of Canada, The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, filling Station, ditch, and others. His recent chapbooks include aeiou (No Press 2018), uoiea (above/ground press 2019), and teksker (Simulacrum Press 2019). He also has leaflets, booklets and other poetic ephemera out through The Blasted Tree, Penteract Press, and Spacecraft Press. His work has been published both within Canada and internationally, and has been anthologized in Concrete and Constraint (Penteract Press 2018) and Science Poems (Penteract Press 2020).

ART: JESSICA SLIPP

1/18/2020

BECOMING ROCK

Becoming Rock (2018)
Video excerpts from a series of 13 video performances (02:57)

Becoming Rock: Road Rock (2019)
Video still image from performance series ‘Becoming Rock’

Becoming Rock is a series of performative videos that explore the relationship between body and earth through the repeated action of becoming a rock within the landscape. Although it is physically impossible to merge with the land, Jessica Slipp sees the exposure of each repeated attempt as an absurd, awkward, yet genuine and honest gesture to engage with the land.

Jessica Slipp uses rocks as a form and means to compact earth and time. She is interested in what rocks contain and how, when deconstructed, they return to tiny particles of matter – the elemental component to the fabric of the universe and where all of life began. With concern for planet Earth, she looks to Donna Haraway’s rethinking of the Anthropocene and use of the term Chthulucene to describe our current epoch. This encourages the process of thinking, making, and being with all living and non-living species. In this time of ecological crisis and global climate change, it is vitally important to shift anthropocentric modes of thinking about the world to thinking with the world.

Jessica Slipp is a Visual Artist currently living and working in the unceded Indigenous land of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation in Tiohtiá:ke (Montréal). As an interdisciplinary artist her work investigates notions of place, uncovers new perspectives of land & landscape, and challenges the way we exist within the world. She is interested in the the ways that place and identity are embedded in the land through geological, ecological, and human histories, and the intrinsic connection we all share with the world — from the particles that randomly composed it, to the very nature that we embody. Through her artwork she attempts to repattern perspectives towards a more caring and compassionate engagement with the world, and seeks to find new ways of rekindling the fundamental relationship between body and earth.

POETRY: SHARAnya manivannan

1/17/2020

RIVER*

When you leave, take with you the way light shimmered
gold in the river,
how the weight of what you loved swirled into filigreed
gold in the river.

That was how it felt to me, as the eventide of the
annihilated dream,
when I first crossed into illumination at the
threshold of the river.

There were mapmakers before me: their footfalls fade
tender on the earth.
Like you, they brought palms of amaryllis, asked to be
consoled by the river.

There's a pond in the forest whose water only ripples
where you weep.
But here, all ruptures. Let your heart flood,
uncontrolled, into the river.

Listen: the saga unbraids. Loyalties shift, fish-dappled
in her surge.
You can no more submerge a story than you can
hold a river.

Carry all you can into the world, a tributary. But
pilgrim, linger a little.
Sit a while beside me. There are renderings still
untold in the river.

* This poem is from Sharanya Manivannan's second collection, The Altar of the Only World (HarperCollins India, 2017).

Sharanya Manivannan is the author of five books of fiction, poetry and children's literature, including the novel The Queen of Jasmine Country, which was longlisted for the 2019 JCB Prize, longlisted for the Mathrubumi of the Year Award 2020, shortlisted for The Hindu Prize 2019, and the short story collection The High Priestess Never Marries, which won the 2015-2016 South Asia Laadli Media and Advertising Award for Gender Sensitivity (Best Book – Fiction).

<<Previous