Winter 2017

BRITISH COLUMBIA’S MAGAZINE FOR WRITERS WINTER 2017 $6.95

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CONTENTS

•

Mary Ann Moore

05

The Place you Already Are

Kate Braid

08

Mystery

Ursula Vaira

09

Commas: Short and Sweet

Judy Millar

11

Got Writer's Block? Try Writer's Crush

Robert Martens

13

Diabetica

Jill Talbot

14

You Aren't Crazy, You're A Writer

16

Spring Writes Festival Schedule

18

Nominate an Ambassador!

Erin Linn McMullan

19

Incurable

Heather Conn

23

Writing for Healing

Richard Osler

25

The Doctor Inside Words

27

LAUNCHED! New Titles by FBCW Members

WORDWORKS IS PROVIDED FREE, QUARTERLY, TO MEMBERS OF THE FEDERATION OF BC WRITERS AND IS AVAILABLE ON OUR WEB PAGE, AND IN SELECT BRITISH COLUMBIA PUBLIC LIBRARIES. TO JOIN THE FBCW, OR PURCHASE A SUBSCRIPTION TO WORDWORKS, GO TO BCWRITERS.CA

•

Page 1 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

FROM THE EDITOR A

s we tiptoe into the beginnings of 2017, we hope to leave behind what some are calling “the worst year in recent memory.” Is that a fair assesment, though? We lost many creative souls last year, and saw some daunting political changes, but we are still here, and we have some great memories. I’ve been told I’m too positive, but I like to look at the bright side of the past year. In 2016 The Federation of BC Writers regained its forward momentum, and has climbed as a current and engaging presence in the literary world. We gained confidence, and with that confidence, we gained members, each contributing to our community, each with an enthusiasm for the written word. Progress is continuing. Writers are finding fodder for stories—fiction and nonfiction—in every doorway. There is so much to write about, bad and good, that I believe this is the beginning of an era of creativity, and we should celebrate that, as we celebrate that we’ve made it through another year, alive and well.

There is also so much to look forward to in 2017. Canada celebrates a 150th anniversary, which brings mixed feelings to the surface, and gives us opportunities to reconcile. WordWorks is having its 35th Anniversary this year, so we’re looking forward to sharing some old articles with you, and uploading all of the old issues to our digital archives. And finally, our Annual General Meeting will be surrounded this year by a four day public literary festival in Nanaimo, BC. See more on this in the centerfold of the magazine.

Thank you all for your continued support, and I look forward to working with you all in 2017, and beyond.

Shaleeta Harper

Publication of The Federation of British Columbia Writers 2014 Bowen Rd, Nanaimo, BC, V9S 1H4 bcwriters.ca

Editorial Board bcwriters.ca/WordWorks/editorialboard Editor in Chief Shaleeta Harper communications@bcwriters.ca Business Manager Thomas Baxter TomBaxter@bcwriters.ca Visuals Editor & Copy Editor Chris Hancock Donaldson FBCW Board Advisor Ann Grah Walker Fiction Editor Andrea McKenzie Raine Poetry Editor Chelsea Comeau Cover Artist Chris Hancock Donaldson © The Federation of British Columbia Writers 2017 All Rights Reserved

Submissions

Content of WordWorks Magazine is, with very occasional exceptions, provided by members of the Federation of BC Writers. If you would like to submit something, or if you have a story idea you would like to see included in WordWorks, please visit bcwriters.ca/WordWorks/submit

Advertising

WordWorks is pleased to advertise services and products that are of genuine interest to writers. Space may also be provided to honour sponsors, whose generous contributions make it possible for the Federation of BC Writers to provide services to writers in BC. For information about advertising policies and rates, see bcwriters.ca/WordWorks/advertisers

Content

Editorial decisions are guided by the mandate of WordWorks as "BC’s Magazine for Writers", and its role as the official publication of the Federation of BC Writers. WordWorks will showcase the writing and poetry of FBCW members'; provide news and feature coverage of writing and writers in BC with an emphasis on writing techniques and the business of writing; carry news about the Federation of BC Writers, and its work supporting and advocating for writers.

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 2

CONTRIBUTORS Mary Ann Moore

Mary Ann Moore brings her passion for poetry and for writing as a spiritual and wellness practice to the writing circles she offers in Nanaimo and beyond. Her poetry, fiction and personal essays have appeared in chapbooks, literary journals including Prairie Fire, Carousel, Room, Freefall and Vallum; anthologies; and on CD. Mary Ann’s full-length book of poems, Fishing for Mermaids, was published by Leaf Press in 2014. She writes a blog at apoetsnanaimo.ca and offers a mentoring program called Writing Home: A Whole Life Practice which is outlined on her website: maryannmoore.ca.

Heather Conn

Heather Conn is the author of two nonfiction books and one fantasy picture book. She has written for 50+ publications. A freelance writer, editor, and writing coach, Heather has a master’s in fine arts degree in creative nonfiction from Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.

Judy Millar

Judy Millar is a writer and performer of short stories and essays—some serious, and many humorous.

Her stories have been published in literary journals and anthologies; her humorous essays have appeared in Reader’s Digest (Canada), Writer’s Digest (USA), and elsewhere. Judy is the author of Beaver Bluff: The Librarian Stories. Her book of essays, Millar LITE: A Comic Look at Life, Love, Sex and Survival, is coming in 2017. Judy lives mostly in her head (located, along with her body, in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island). You can also find her at judymillar.ca and on Twitter @JudyMillar.

Erin Linn McMullan

Erin Linn McMullan is a screenwriter and story editor for IMAX Humpback Whales 3D and Cold Paradise (OMNI TV). Her feature screenplay Lotus, a Romeo and Juliet adventure set in 12th Century Japan, was an official selection of VIWIFF 2016. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her adventures with her dog, Wolf inspired Wolf and the Bear (Truth Perceived: Perspectives Through Canadian Nonfiction), Quest Lit, (WestWord: Magazine of the Writers' Guild of Alberta), and her new screenplay, Incurable.

Kate Braid

Kate Braid has written, co-written and edited eleven books of non-fiction and prize-winning poetry. Her latest books are a memoir,Journeywoman: Swinging a Hammer in a Man's World about her 15 years in construction, and a book of poems, Rough Ground Revisited. In 1995, with Sandy Shreve she edited the ground-breaking book, In Fine Form: The Canadian Book of Form Poems; its expanded second edition was published in 2016.

Robert Martens

Robert Martens was raised in the Mennonite village of Yarrow, B.C., then known as "the centre of the universe." He fast-forwarded several centuries when he attended Simon Fraser University during its most tempestuous years. Recently he has helped write and edit several local histories in an attempt to show our relentless blacktopping of the past. He also continues to wage the battle of the losers by writing poetry in his spare time. Robert lives in Abbotsford and is a member of the board of directors of thee Mennonite Historical Society of B.C.

Ursula Vaira

Ursula Vaira is a freelance editor with twenty-five years of editing experience with BC and Alberta publishers and with individual writers. She is a member of the Professional Editors Association of Vancouver Island. She is also the founder and editor of Leaf Press, a literary publisher operating from Lantzville on Vancouver Island. You can find her at ursulavaira.ca or at leafpress.ca.

Jill Talbot

Jill Talbot attended Simon Fraser University for psychology before pursing her passion for writing.

Jill has appeared in Geist, Rattle, The Puritan, Matrix and subTerrain, was shortlisted for the Matrix Lit POP Award for fiction in 2015 and the Malahat Far Horizons Award for poetry in 2016. She had a staged reading of her play God In Psych Ward Pajamas put on by Western Edge Theatre in 2015 and her play If That Looking Glass Gets Broke was commended by the BBC in 2016. Jill lives on Gabriola Island, BC. @Jilltalbo

Richard Osler

Richard Osler lives in Duncan on Vancouver Island, where he leads occasional writing retreats for poets and weekly poetry workshops at The Cedars, an addiction recovery centre.

His latest book of poems, Hyaena Season, was published in 2016. His poems have appeared in many journals. In 2011 he was a finalist for the Malahat Open Season Awards in poetry and in 2015 he was longlisted for the PRISM International Poetry Prize. Richard’s poetry blog is at recoveringwords.com and in June 2017 he leads a ten day retreat for poets in Umbria, Italy. See website for details.

Page 3 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

THE PRESIDENT’S PEN ANN GRAHAM WALKER Dear Writers, I hope by the time you read this we will have thawed back into our familiar soft fern-like shapes. Right now it is early January and, outside my kitchen window, my pond's fountain spray (which I forgot to winterize this year) has frozen into a bowl of ice. The rosemary bush is puckered up— not a good sign in rosemaries.

Our annual general meeting is always an opportunity to visit a community, put on some workshops and readings and celebrate writers and writing. This year, in Nanaimo, we received funding from several avenues (The City of Nanaimo, the Nanaimo Hospitality Association, and, as always, the BC Arts Council) and have developed it into a four day writing festival, open to the public. Nanaimo Spring Writes we've called it, and it's happening April 27-30, 2017. Look at the center of the magazine for a glimpse at the schedule, which includes workshops and master classes by Giller Prize nominees Kathy Page and Steven Price, by non-fiction writer extraordinaire Angie Abdou, hot new novelist Jennifer Manuel, poet Carla Funk, PhD Sonnet L'Abbe, poet/publisher Ursula Vaira, and more. There will be a day long publishing extravaganza on the Saturday, and all kinds of fun events like writer hang outs and treasure hunts, ghost walks of Nanaimo's historic downtown, celebrations of the city's rich Snuneymuxw culture, and a gala evening of entertainment. You will want to book early on our website for the workshops, space will be limited and there will be people coming from all over. We'll also have listings of hotels that have given our members special price deals—there's a range of them, including a hostel option, and if you need a billet or a room mate let us know, we'll do what we can to help.

I do hope you are able to come. What Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 4

could be better than to spend the weekend with a bunch of writers? Old friends. New friends. And we managed to dodge the bustle of May this year, as many requested.

April will be a beautiful time to get together.

There's one other thing: we're on a trajectory to make 1000 members this year!

One thousand. That will be so awesome.

Tell your friends—you know, the ones in your writing group who haven't joined yet.

Maybe they'd like to come along to Nanaimo Spring Writes.

Best wishes everyone and good luck with your writing, Ann

THE PLACE YOU ALREADY ARE: POETRY AS MEDICINE

MARY ANN MOORE

“P

oetry can carry a burden,” poet Lorna Crozier said. “Poetry has the remarkable ability to hold opposites: passion and restraint, joy and sorrow, clarity and ambiguity, humour and gravitas. It sets out to do one impossible thing and takes a swerve and does something else,” she wrote in the introduction to a chapbook anthology called The Precise Dimension of Light (Leaf Press, 2016).

While I had to miss a much-anticipated poetry retreat with Lorna, I was able to attend a retreat with Ellen Bass in Nanoose Bay, on Vancouver Island. As one of our exercises, Ellen suggested we take a story we know well and be open to a new discovery—that’s when a poem can take a revealing swerve. I wrote this in the forty minutes or so we were given: Because the surgeon bears an impish grin and pulls himself closer to me on a wheel-less stool —he looks me straight in the eye long enough for me to know he sees me— and because he wears a mauve shirt with co-ordinating tie, directs my gaze to a wall calendar and says: This will all be over in five months, I accept his prescription: five weeks of radiation, six weeks of rest, surgery in November.

We leave the building, walk slowly to the car.

Let’s just go home, Sarah says.

Because our home is across the Salish Sea, we drive, silently, to the ferry at Horseshoe Bay. In the line-up, Sarah goes for take-out fish and chips.

When they arrive, I eat them. Ravenous.

I began with something I knew well and ended with a door opening: I was ravenous for life.

With over forty years of teaching, Ellen, the co-author of The Courage to Heal, has “found that writing is a powerful act of healing.” She has worked with survivors of childhood sexual abuse and in an interview said that “women and men who had been abused were able to share their stories through writing in a way that transformed their experience”.

I too lead poetry circles and in a recent one used the theme of “The Place You Already Are” based on a quote of Jane Hirschfield’s: “Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” The participants shared the very real and often terrifying events of their present lives. In so doing, we each felt an honouring of ourselves and our stories. The effects are what I consider living a new story, one in which we accept all parts of ourselves.

The circle offers a framework and some guidelines for whatever comes. We sit with our own experience and some of that experience is grief. Billy Collins, a former US poet laureate, said: “Poetry is one of the original grief counseling centers. It has always been a way of giving form to wailing and to the convulsions of grief.”

When I started offering women’s writing circles in 1997, I realized writing was my wellness practice. In more recent years, I’ve been inspired and affirmed by several local poets I’ve had the pleasure of reading and meeting.

In “A Beautiful Imposition,” one of the essays included in her memoir, Born Out of This, Clayoquot Sound poet Christine Lowther wrote that poetry healed her youth “and nature was the conveyor of the poetry. Together, nature and poem writing conspired to heal me, like an art therapy. Living in a wild place— where every leaf is its own poem—brings healing process and poetry together.”

Page 5 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

Despite her “violent origins” Christine said “Poetic expression, for me, continues to equal repair, restoration and growth.”

Amber Dawn of Vancouver, author of How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, invites readers “to explore your own story of survival, speaking out, finding community, and treasuring your own experiences . . . I found poetry, and it did indeed save my life, but there are many ways to tell your story. And if I can be anything of an example, there are many rewards to speaking your truths.”

Sometimes we forget about the practice that keeps us “sane.”

Haida Gwaii poet Susan Musgrave said that in January 2016 he set herself a task of writing a poem a day first thing in the morning (The New Quarterly Summer 2016). Choosing one word or phrase from Mark Nepo’s The Book of Awakening,

Susan gave herself permission to write what she wanted to “even if it verges on the sentimental or self-indulgent, whatever. The astonishing thing is, I’ve had a whole month without being depressed. This is a rare occurrence for me. What’s even more astonishing is that I should be so surprised. I’ve known, since I was fourteen, that poetry keeps me ‘sane.’ Why do I forget, time after time, what it is I need to do?”

I’ve had the honour of attending master poet Patrick Lane’s poetry retreats for ten years. There is a powerful acceptance and a witnessing when we poets, usually twenty of us, share our truths. Patrick offers on-the-spot editing and, as we are there to learn, we accept his advice. We don’t talk about the content. We talk about the craft and because we know Patrick has gone to dark places and can sit with us as we express

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 6

ours, in my experience, we find a healing of memories. A remembering. A letting go. And the great gift of writing in community: we realize we are not alone.

Poet John Fox is a member of the National Association of Poetry Therapy (NAPT) which defines poetry therapy as “the intentional use of the written and spoken word to facilitate healing, growth and transformation.”

While attending a poetry retreat with John on Bowen Island some years ago, we wrote poems as responses to our reading of well-known poets. Our poetry writing was not about the craft. This reminds me of a poem by Philip Levine, “The Simple Truth”: Some things / you know all your life. They are so simple and true / they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, / they must be laid on the table beside the salt

shaker, . . .

Poet Gregory Orr said: “As a writer, my faith is that words can help us connect and make sense of our lives by bringing out our secrets and shames as well as our joys (The New York Times, August 29, 2014).

I have spoken to others about this and find it is the key to the healing nature of poetry.

The silence surrounding a traumatic event is much worse than the event itself. Orr said: “But not to speak of what has happened is also dangerous. Silence quickly transforms guilt into shame, and shame builds walls of isolation that can be almost impossible to breach.”

Poems can carry a burden and stories of survival. Poetry is a powerful medicine in its ability to transform, repair and restore as poets put an end to silence.

Further Resources: John Fox, publisher of Poetic Medicine, an online journal poeticmedicine.org Kim Goldberg, Undetectable (Pig Squash Press, 2016) Kim Rosen, Saved by a Poem (Hay House, 2009) Naomi Wakan, Poetry That Heals (Pacific-Rim Publishers, 2014) Richard Osler facilitates weekly poetry workshops at The Cedars, an addiction recovery centre. He writes a blog at: recoveringwords.com Wendy Morton The Elder Project theelderproject.com

Wendy Morton, who began the Elder projects in BC, received a governer generals award for her work in Canada just last month. She had no idea they were taking this picture of her reading the Governor General David Johnston a poem. She cut out a photo in the paper of the Governor General dancing with Sophie Trudeau, and it inspired her to write a poem, which is below.

IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS you are always shaking someone’s hand, smiling.

You pin on medals and the newly ribboned take all your gifts; and they would dance with you, they would dance.

Page 7 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

Mystery

In memory of Heather Werner (1970-2005)

It is not a dark night. Moonlight spills like a web over English Bay. Someone tells us we have come to see spirits and though it’s late, it’s bright as we tramp in single file across a broken landscape (farm? a ravaged field?) following the moon.

You are skeptical. I move as I’m told to a small pillow of soil by the water.

What am I waiting for?

Around me light has come and gone and come again. There is a silky sheen to the air when I notice a small object in the soil, a bright copper penny. One. Then another, dozens scattered like seeds. They are everywhere: copper the colour of a woman’s hair, copper fallen in a mantle, pennies from heaven.

There is no mystery. This is how I know: by the earth beneath my feet, by the heaving breast of sea, by the small check mark of birds against the sky.

I know this place. I can find it again, everywhere now I see it in the wave of poppies, blush of sunset, red cheeks of apples. What was I worried about?

She is everywhere.

KATE BRAID

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 8

COMMAS: SHORT AND SWEET URSULA VAIRA

T

here are three main uses for commas. Let’s begin with the easiest:

1. To separate items in a series. (The series, or Oxford, comma.) Should you use a comma before the “and” in a series? It’s a matter of style. You’ll have to choose one, then be consistent with it.

Both of these are correct: She taught them math, spelling, science and geometry.

She taught them math, spelling, science, and geometry.

Correct: I sometimes dream of owning a little grey pony.

Incorrect: I sometimes dream of owning a little, grey pony.

2. To join two complete sentences (which then become independent clauses—clauses with subjects and predicates) with a coordinating conjunction. Put the comma before and, but, or, nor, for, yet, and so. Pretty easy, right?

Just don’t join two complete sentences with only a comma. That is called a comma splice: Harold drove a camper van, he loved take it to the mountains.

But read carefully to avoid ambiguity!

From a book dedication: To my parents, Ayn Rand and God. From a news article: Among those interviewed were his two exwives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. (Thank you Wikipedia for these funny examples!)

And, pay attention if your series is formed of adjectives which have suddenly turned into adverbs! Is that adjective modifying the noun or is it modifying another adjective? I can never tell! So here is a reliable cheat. If you can insert the word “and” between the adjectives then you need the commas.

Correct: I sometimes dream of meeting a strong, tall, handsome man.

Incorrect: I sometimes dream of meeting a strong tall handsome man.

Let’s fix it: Or: Or:

Harold drove a camper van; he loved to take it to the mountains.

Harold drove a camper van. He loved to take it to the mountains.

Harold drove a camper van, and he loved to take it to the mountains.

3. To set off parenthetical elements in a sentence. Think of these commas as coming in pairs, just like parentheses and dashes.

They frame information that is “extra” or “incidental” to your (complete) sentence.

The horse, which preferred clover to grass, jumped the fence daily.

The horse (which preferred clover to grass) jumped the fence daily.

The horse—which preferred clover to grass—jumped the fence daily.

Page 9 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

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In each case you could erase the framed words and still have a complete sentence left over.

Sometimes a capital letter will replace the first comma; sometimes a period will replace the second comma (just as they replace initial or final dashes). Your clue is to identify the complete sentence.

After I had finished shopping, I discovered that I had left my wallet at home.

She did an excellent job on her second essay, although the first one was a disaster.

Once again, you could erase the framed words and still have a complete sentence left behind.

Knowing that such commas come in pairs helps avoid errors like this one: the sin of putting a (single) comma between the subject and the verb: The horse which preferred clover to grass, jumped the fence daily.

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 10

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All of that being said, be aware that framing words between commas changes the meaning of the sentence when those words are not incidental but essential!

Plumbers, who drink too much, are untrustworthy.

Plumbers who drink too much are untrustworthy.

Remember that in the first sentence, the framed words provide us with incidental information. Once you erase them, the remaining sentence states that plumbers are untrustworthy! The second sentence is quite clear that only plumbers who drink too much are untrustworthy.

Those three will get you through the hardest parts. There are also rules of convention for the comma: in dialogue, with quotation marks, for breath and rhythm, with dates, with salutations and so on. Just refer to a good book, or a good site. I always recommend The Canadian Writer’s Handbook (Messenger and de Bruyn, Prentice Hall) for its clear explanations. I love online sources, too, but I haven’t yet found one that makes punctuation easy. I’d love to hear suggestions!

GOT WRITER’S BLOCK? TRY WRITER’S CRUSH JUDY MILLAR

T

hey say that writing to heal trauma and illness really works. But writing WHILE you’re healing can be tricky. I should know.

I’ve been trying to write with a crushed lumbar 1 vertebra. If my condition were a country song, I’d be singing "The Brokeback Writer’s Blues."

My “writer’s crush” has piled complications onto my already-pesky writer’s block.

Now I’m not just stuck for words—I’m stuck in bed. I can’t even sit up to type on my laptop—my spine says NO to putting my body into an “L” shape and fuggedaboutit when I ask it to lie flat. Necessity’s been the mother of invention.

If your garden-variety writer’s block has you bored, I challenge you to try pumping out today’s prose quota my way: Head to bed and try to write something using one of my crush-crafted techniques:

#1 ELBOW-WRITE IT Elbow-writing is not to be confused with the free-writing technique espoused

by Peter Elbow, author of a book originally titled Writing without Tears. (Unlike Dr. Elbow’s technique, my approach may well trigger tears.)

Lie on your left side, facing your laptop placed on the mattress. Support your

weight on your elbow. Forget touch typing.

Only your right hand is properly aimed to peck away at your laptop keyboard. Tell it to Go, GO, GO! Type something. Anything!

Tap-tap-tap until your elbow’s ulnar nerve screams Stop, STOP, STOP! Mop up sweat and tears. Move laptop.

Gingerly rotate your body onto your right side so you can again view your laptop.

Support your weight on your right elbow.

Rinse and repeat.

#2 TATTLE-TALE IT I know. Your fingers are tingling. The numbness will pass. Meanwhile, distract yourself with technique #2: Talk your tale.

I can’t dictate a whole novel, you protest.

Shh. One day at a time. Luckily we’re not in this alone. I’ve got Siri on my bedside table (you may have Robin or maybe Cortana). Grab your smart phone and whisper sweet nothings into your virtual assistant’s ear. Rattle on, tattle on, and you might surprise yourself by netting a few sweet somethings. Of course they may not all look like the words you intended. I tested Siri on the Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this compliment a new nation, conceived in puberty …

#3 RETRO-WRITE IT All talked out? Me too. I finally gave technology the heave-ho and reverted to writing with a plain old pen. Retro-writing rocks—at least judging by the results of some of its proponents. Author Joyce Carol Oates says she’s written longhand for up to eight hours a day. Director Quentin Tarantino writes screenplays using felt-tipped pens.

Pulitzer prize-winner Jhumpa Lahiri says the writing she does longhand is superior.

Who am I to quibble with Quentin? Who are you to laugh at Lahiri? We may not have Pulitzers, but while we have pens, we have PROMISE! Even the bedridden can scribble while they heal. The words you’ve just read were written in bed. Via elbow (ouch!), via Siri, or à la Lahiri. I urge you to give crush-writing a try. Even if your manuscript’s a muddle, you’ll soon appreciate that, unlike mine, your vertebrae can get vertical. Plus, blasting through your commonplace writer’s block will feel like a cakewalk once you tried it contorted on a mattress.

Thanks for playing along! Oh, and sorry about your tingling ulnar nerve. Good luck with that.

Page 11 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 12

woke up dragged my body out of bed into hollow hungry morning the tongue half stoned with dream the stomach wailing newborn desires myself seduced by the scour of daylight by mother kitchen calling her children home – the salt smoke of bacon pancakes belly flopped in syrup the subversive spatter of fried potatoes – and then the shock of memory – diabetic disjunction – toxic breakfast taunting me from the sterile stove – while acid tides slashed forests chew and spit gluttony our cities eating faster faster – * i spent the long day remembering. the yesterday before yesterday. eve and adam, naked, naive, unaware of the quake that would bury the garden.

of the hunger yet to be invented. lilies sprouted from their fingertips, thistles from their toes, lion and lizard lounged at their heels. the milky mist. we breathed it, drank it, were born. woke up outside eden. the world’s sweetness cursed, our insulated, insulined day. * welcome in. twilight, the taste of slumber. a table set for us in the presence of our enemies. bow your heads, friends, we are gathered here to partake of this moment. war’s salt smoke across the river, refugees on a boiling bridge, begging to be fed. before the dreams return, remember the promise, milk and honey, the sweetness that lingers through the night. welcome back.

diabetica ROBERT MARTENS Page 13 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

YOU AREN’T CRAZY, YOU’RE A WRITER JILL TALBOT Pete, is Elliot your imaginary friend?

What's imaginary?

Well, it's when you make someone up in your head so that you have someone to talk to. It keeps you from being lonely.

—Pete’s Dragon

O

h good you’re writing, that’s very therapeutic, a psych ward nurse tells me with that sing-song voice that only exists in psych wards. I don’t think much of my response, but when I look back, I will think of it as somewhat evil. A poet friend tells me to tell them that I'm an author. I don’t. The less they know, the better.

Is writing therapeutic? It’s hard to imagine a session of therapy where I’m advised to stare at a wall, talk to imaginary friends, and subject myself to never-ending rejection.

Evelyn Lau created writing Gods who allowed her to survive but I always seem to create imaginary enemies or imaginary healers who I don’t trust. Exposure therapy to external horrors makes sense, but internal?

Sometimes my whole life feels like one never-ending therapy session with slogans like: YOU ARE OKAY! One day at a time, You can do this!

I always want to ask, if I am okay, why am I in therapy?

When mental health counsellors are sent to a tragedy, later rates of PTSD are higher than when none are sent. Focusing on our lives as something to be healed from is a dangerous set-up; forgetting that writing is work is equally problematic. When your value is in your damage, there isn’t a lot of room for growth. When your work Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 14

results in condescending sing-song Good for yous, it’s hard to believe you can recover or should even bother.

A friend tells me writing is like entering a battlefield without armour. I want to protest, what about all of the hours, days, years of plain boring hard work? What about the stacks of rejection letters? What about the famous writers who went into battlefield with whiskey as armour?

I find the glorification of writing as battle more condescending than inspiring.

Playing the piano can be healing but no one ever doubts the amount of hard work needed to play Beethoven flawlessly or would compare it to a battle.

The notion of writing as healing is not unlike the notion of a psychiatrist who goes into it to heal themselves. They may have more compassion for their clients, but to be a successful psychiatrist, they need to be able to peer into windows of others. Some doctors are beginning to prescribe books to those who are suffering, suggesting that reading may be the real act of healing, and the writer is just like the psychiatrist who initially wanted to heal themselves and found a new role—a new window. Writing never tells you that you’re okay, to go one day at a time, or diagnosis you as unstable.

Writing offers an entrance into a cave and asks you to enter at your own liability.

The first real poem I wrote was sitting outside my childhood home (then with new owners) at 3 AM. I wrote another outside an institution I had a falling out with.

But fiction offers the most success as it asks nothing of you. What starts off as Disneyland could end up being a dystopian cult.

It cares not if you are damaged or okay or what list of belongings you should bring, it just asks you to enter.

Friends often say, you can talk to me about anything. It usually turns out that they mean is that I can talk to them about anything except (enter long list of off-limit topics). Writing is different. Writing says just talk.

I was speaking with a publisher about a chapbook of poetry regarding some of my difficult experiences. Not only did he want me to fit into the mould of the most popular hot topics, he wanted some message of hope.

I wanted to shout, there is no hope!

You keep going because what else can you do? The voice is the hope. Redemption is in the voice. However I was unable to say much of anything and we awkwardly finished that phone call and never heard from one another again.

I have been diagnosed with most mental disorders at some point in my life.

Writing taught me that my perspective, my experiences, and my voice were each something to value. They taught me that I didn’t need therapy to overcome them, I just needed the right avenue to release them into the world. In viewing my past and my current eccentricities as not something to be healed from but something of value, I allowed myself to move into a new role as a writer. I refuse to offer hope, because I never wanted someone to offer me hope.

Perhaps my problem is that healing has always implied damage, and not skill.

As I become healthier, my writing has only become more disturbed, suggesting that

writing for healing isn’t such nonsense.

This relates a lot to exposure therapy, where one relives some traumatic experience. We use abstractions in everyday life in order to avoid really going back to the scene. Writing gets us away from this, demands that we enter completely and abandon abstractions at the gate. The movements I make when writing are also not unlike the movements made in EMDR (eye movement desensitization reprocessing) where one reprocesses traumatic events with a therapist. But it is not a battlefield, not a psychiatric retreat.

I once asked for writing that would hit me repeatedly until I was hospitalized. A week later I was hospitalized. The iro-

ny that surrounds us can only be turned into humour through creativity. Otherwise it’s just plain depressing.

I’m on the ferry now. I keep seeing a dead crab in my mind and I want to save it from knowing its fate, I want to save it from heaven, I want to undo this story like a thread. Psychoanalysis would tell me that I really am the crab. To which I say no shit.

I see the trees and cliff reflection through a Coca Cola vending machine and recall drinking a coke on the beach of Brighton after a night of cocaine with a psych nurse both too old and too controlling to be an appropriate choice. I see the past in interpretive dances and in people waiting for

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the bus. I see it in the roses on my mattress. There’s a lot more money in seeing the future than seeing the past. To see the future play out as the past—that’s literature. Sometimes I think I’ve seen enough but I always find myself drawn back.

A friend rants about my BC Ferries Disability Status Identification Card. I ask her what she expects it to be called—Thinks Different Identification Card?

The truth is that both of us are getting wounded and eccentric mixed up. I am both.

The saying, you aren’t crazy, you’re an writer, sticks with me. I was told this once, and I have heard other poets be told the same thing. After spending much time in hospitals, mental health groups, etc, I am more

and more convinced that there is no separation. Don’t try to heal from being eccentric, do heal from trauma. Don’t glorify your wounds such that you are unable to let go of them. I am not going to claim that I can offer anyone hope for the future.

I can just offer the promise that someone else looked out a similar window.

In the library I catch bits of Pete’s Dragon, which children are watching with popcorn.

Are they funny?

Sure.

Do they fly?

I guess they can do whatever you want them to. That's what makes them imaginary.

I suppose they can heal.

Amen.

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Page 15 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

10-12 10-3:30 12-1 1-3 2-5 5:30 7-10

Thursday, April 27th _____________________________________________________________________________ Workshop with Holly Bright | Nanaimo Harbour Dance Centre | Poetry & Dance | $25 members /$35 non-members* ______________________________________________________________________________ Retreat with Carla Funk | St Paul's | Salvage, Save, Redeem & Rescue... | $50 members /$60 non-members* ______________________________________________________________________________ Brownbag Lunch Reading with David Fraser | Harbourfront Library | Free! ______________________________________________________________________________ Workshop with Ursula Vaira | Harbourfront Library | How to Read (and love) Poetry | Free! ___________________________________________________________________________ Write-In | Lighthouse Pub | Free! | No registration necessary. ______________________________________________________________________________ Dinner | Check FBCW social media to find out where the other writers have headed ______________________________________________________________________________ WordStorm Society of the Arts: A special edition of the WordStorm Society of the Arts' legendary evening of featured readers & open mic. All welcome. $5 cover at door

Friday, April 28th _____________________________________________________________________________ Write In | Nanaimo Museum | Free | No registration necessary. _____________________________________________________________________________ Brownbag Lunch Reading with Jennifer Manuel | Harbourfront Library | Free! ______________________________________________________________________________ Master Class with Angie Abdou | St. Pauls | Hook and Hold Your Reader: Creative Non-Fiction $25 members /$35 non-members* ___________________________________________________________________________ Master Class with Kathy Page | St. Pauls Church |Short Story Writing $25 members /$35 non-members* ___________________________________________________________________________ Student Chapbook Readings from Elder Project in Nanaimo | MC: Wendy Morton | Free! ______________________________________________________________________________ Room: An Informal Reading Circle | All Welcome | No Registration Necessary 2 Living _____________________________________________________________________________ Language Panel | Location TBA | Free!

2:30 ______________________________________________________________________________ Official Welcoming Meet & Greet | Location TBA | open to all | Free! | no registration necessary 3-5 ______________________________________________________________________________ Dinner | Check FBCW social media to find out where the other writers have headed 5 ______________________________________________________________________________ Winter 2017 â—† Gala WordWorks PageStories 16 that Find Us" | Convention Center | Cash bar & appetizers | $15 members /$25 non-members* Evening: â—†"The 7-10 Too much to list... visit bcwriters.ca to learn more about this enthralling evening

10-12

12-1

12:30-3

12:30-3 2

NANAIMO

APRIL 27-30, 2017

SPRING WRITES FESTIVAL 10-1 9-3 9-2 12-1 12-4 1 3:30 7

10-12 10-12 10 12

Saturday, April 29th _____________________________________________________________________________ Master Class with Steven Price | St. Pauls Church | Key elements of Fiction | $45 members /$65 non-members* _____________________________________________________________________________ Publishing Fair | A pocket guide to getting published, with speakers, panelists, & exhibitors | $10 members /$15 non-members* ______________________________________________________________________________ Write-In and Guided Tour of Newcastle Island (weather permitting) ___________________________________________________________________________ Brownbag Lunch Reading with Angie Abdou | Harbourfront Library | Free! ______________________________________________________________________________ Games and Treasure Hunts, Downtown Nanaimo | TBA ___________________________________________________________________________ Living Room: An Informal Reading Circle | All Welcome | No Registration Necessary ______________________________________________________________________________ FBCW AGM: For FBCW Members Only | Vancouver Island Convention Center ___________________________________________________________________________ Story Telling by "Around the Town Tellers," and Open Mic | Vancouver Island Convention Center | $5

Sunday, April 30th _____________________________________________________________________________ Workshop with Jennifer Manuel | St. Pauls Church | Developing a Stong Narrative Theme | $25 members /$35 non-members* _____________________________________________________________________________ Workshop with Sonnet L'Abbe | Topic TBA | St. Pauls Church | $25 members /$35 non-members* ______________________________________________________________________________ Heritage Walk Downtown Nanaimo | $5 ___________________________________________________________________________ Lunch: Check FBCW Social Media to find out where other writers have headed

all events require registration at bcwriters.ca unless otherwise stated blue pencil sessions will be available by appointment throughout the festival *Pricing for events: the lower rate is for members of the FBCW and WordStorm Events are open to everyone, but non-members will pay a slightly elevated rate, as indicated Page 17 â—† WordWorks â—† Winter 2017 we couldn't fit all of the exciting information into this preview, and things may change for more information, please visit bcwriters.ca

AMBASSADOR NOMINATION FORM Every year the FBCW has the opportunity to honour one person whose public activity has raised the profile of writers in the community with our Honourary Ambassador award. (It is not necessarily awarded annually, but the opportunity is there).

Non-members are eligible to be nominated for this award, as long as they believe in the Federation’s work. Only members can nominate potential ambassadors. The recipient gets a lifetime FBCW membership. Our first Honourary Ambassador was Nanaimo’s poet laureate, Naomi Beth Wakan, who celebrated poetry in schools, clubs and council meetings and created a poetry map of her city. Until March 15th, 2017, we’ll be collecting your nominations for our next Honourary Ambassador, to be awarded at the 2017 AGM. Please fill out the form below and send to: The Federation of BC Writers, PO Box 3753 Vancouver Stn Main, Vancouver, BC, V6B 3Z1, or go to bcwriters.ca/application-for-ambassador/ and fill out the digital form.

Your Name:

first

Your Address:

last

street postal code

Your Contact Information: Name of Nominee:

city

phone or email first

Nominee Address:

last

street postal code

Nominee Contact Information: Occupation of Nominee: Your relationship to Nominee:

city phone or email if applicable

Please tell us how you know the nominee

Finally, please include a statement that explains why you believe this person should be recognized as an FBCW ambassador. Feel free to include supporting documents.

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 18

INCURABLE: THE LONG LITERARY GOODBYE AND THE POWER OF WORDS TO STOP TIME

ERIN LINN MCMULLAN

E

very day for a year, I wake up in the morning and face the fact that my dog, Wolf, will die of incurable cancer. Not just any dog, but the hero who saved my life from a bear—a story now read by high school students across Canada. His adventures thread throughout my writing—a literary dog, my heart, my muse. This is what I must face losing: the single greatest embodiment of unconditional love, trust, and acceptance in my life. A metaphor in fur with a blaze shaved across his shoulder where a tumour once grew.

The problem with this extreme grief is that the one tool I have always reached for to heal, writing, eludes me. I cannot scribble more than a Facebook post to keep Wolf ’s community apprised of his progress, but someday I will depend on these same status reports when I am ready to write my screenplay, Incurable. This story will use as its framework Wolf ’s epic yearlong battle with cancer but it will also illustrate his bravery, at my side, out in the wilds of western Canada and US. On his seventh birthday, on a good day between chemo treatments, I take my dog to our local pet store to buy a Chuckit! (a long-handled ball launcher); sure it will only get one use, maybe

two. Wolf is greeted by his favourite clerk, Caleb, who proudly tells the other employees about his bravery with the bear and with cancer. But it is Caleb’s next two words that stop my heart, “cancer survivor.” From now on these words replace “terminally ill” in my lexicon.

Since celebrating his birthday cannot wait for tomorrow, Wolf and I head to our local park in the rain—a joyous break from the plus 36 Celsius temperatures of interior BC. I chuck the ball and Wolf flies across the slick green grass after it. He zips past the tree where only a week ago he lay limply against my lap as I brushed out his fur and told him the story of how much I loved him.

Here is my confession: I am equally incurable, infected with hope. From the moment he is diagnosed with subcutaneous hemangiosarcoma—from which 100 percent of dogs die within a year—I believe I can help him beat the odds. Once I get past the word “incurable”—a word that stops my breath—I read in the fine print that one or two rare dogs have survived longer, years longer.

Wolf is a survivor. At seven weeks, motherless and recovering from a mysterious illness that kept doctors working around-thePage 19 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 20 (Photo: Rob Ridgen)

clock for three days, I carried him in my backpack as a trail guide; at three months, he climbed Mt. Goldenhorn in the Yukon; at five years, he scaled the mile-high Chilkoot Pass from Alaska to BC. Now as I watch him soar gracefully through the rain, he is defying the vet’s prediction that he would be lame once part of his shoulder muscle was removed along with the tumour.

My heart holds two facts simultaneously: this may be Wolf ’s last birthday and love has the power to do the impossible.

Wolf has never liked water and he is scared by the rushing arctic river below, as much as by the way the boards creak and sway under his paws on the suspension bridge on the Chilkoot. When he shifts his 32-kg bulk in panic, one hind foot hovers over air and the bridge tips dangerously. Crawling backwards on my hands and knees, I coax him inch-by-inch across until we are safe. It is the ultimate act of trust.

I remember this exact feeling as I sit with him in the back kennel of the veterinary clinic. He is dozing on my lap, wrapped in his favourite wolf blanket, a comfort snatched from home. I am careful not to move his IV and set off the alarm again as I balance the book on screenwriting and struggle to improve my craft with my thesis deadline looming. I focus on its pages to keep myself from crying. Wolf has had round-the-clock care here since he crashed after chemo number five. This is his fifth day at the clinic (and mine) and I’m waiting for the vet to decide when he can come home. He finally ate a little this morning. As the vet tech brings a bowl of warm food, Wolf opens one eye and sniffs the air.

Grief has stripped me raw. Apart from a few quick words on social media to say Wolf ’s home and out of danger for now, I cannot write another word about him as I agonize over whether to continue chemo.

Only one more treatment remains but I’m afraid this time I might lose him. Instead all my grief overflows into my thesis screenplay (a separate project from Incurable) as I cancel everything else to stay home, write, and care for Wolf.

However much Wolf conquered his fear of water striding across the Chilkoot’s arctic rivers, I could not anticipate how

much the wide and muddy North Thompson would comfort him this summer. I am hip-deep next to him, in bathing shorts, soothing cupfuls of water with my hand over the hot fur on his back. I moisten the fur in that sweet spot behind each of his ears. I run my wet fingertips gently down the bridge of his nose. His eyes close briefly.

Satisfaction, tolerance? Hopefully relief.

Here, the current is a tickle, swishing past our legs but just beyond this gentle eddy the current runs strong. Standing here outside its pull is a balancing act harder than any I have ever attempted. Wolf leans companionably against my leg, easily tired, and soon we will have to go. Earlier, we

(Photo: Nancy Powis)

Page 21 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

watched a muskrat swim by this very spot and I saw a spark of interest flicker in Wolf ’s eyes.

Just around the bend, the muddy, mysterious North Thompson is joined by the clearer South Thompson, colliding in a confluence and rushing on into a landscape I cannot imagine. Not far from this sheltered shady spot near the riverbanks; my dog and I together.

Wolf ’s eyes are closing again, tired, drugged, sated, he is ready to leave. I am not ready yet, but I turn towards the shore to accompany him home.

I stand now, a year later, in front of a patchwork quilt of 3 x 5 cards spread out across a bulletin board. Each memory I pin up forms the basis of a cinematic scene. Re-arranging these scenes’ order, I discover their connective tissue as the rivers and tributaries pulse from my heart onto the page.

Wolf enjoyed seven months in remission, and he spent much of that time back home on Vancouver Island, where he was happiest—on the shorelines of its many beaches, with me.

When I scattered his ashes near the rocky headlands where we loved to sit together and watch the ocean, I sat and read his story, “Wolf and the Bear” aloud. This time, I didn’t hold back my tears.

There is a bravery in that too.

It took three months and engaging a hospice worker for support before my words began to flow again. Now, every morning, I wake up and begin writing.

There is a new fierceness in this death-defying act. I am a survivor too.

I am inspired by reading other writers struggling with the same grief: John Grogan began writing Marley & Me a month after Marley’s death; Ted Kerasote wrote Merle’s Door after the loss of the dog who opened his heart.

I understand because when I write about Wolf he is alive again and I am with him, mid-adventure. I can begin my long goodbye. boy.

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 22

Goodbye, my sweet lovely

WRITING FOR HEALING HEATHER CONN

O

ne by one, the dozen or so adult students in a circle of desks read aloud the painful true stories they have written. The searing wounds of rape. The stigma of mental illness and getting institutionalized. The lure of suicide. Some start crying and have to stop reading. I hand them a tissue. They continue, through sniffles. Although rapt, a few listeners begin to cry. The reading voice continues.

As their writing instructor seated in the circle, I ask myself: Is it fair to put people through this? Am I causing them needless anguish? But I see and hear the relief they express once they push through tears and finish sharing their personal tale. Others affirm the power of their words. They are not alone.

I remind myself: this was a voluntary assignment. I had invited them to write about an issue for which they still had not made “an emotional completion” and to read it at the end of our eight-week course. In this final class, I applaud their courage, reinforcing how writers can see beyond the surface of life to the darkness and depths that we all must face to heal. It takes courage to break silence and secrets. I tell them, “You are all like warriors. Peaceful ones. It might feel like hell to go through this, but trust me, writing these words and releasing them so that others can

listen is healing for us all.”

I make sure they are not the only ones being vulnerable. I read aloud some childhood experiences I have never shared with anyone. My words are the voice of a confused five-year-old wondering why her mother won’t let her tell anyone what happened between her and her dad. I have to pause while reading. My chest feels sore and atremble.

Am I going to cry? I want to stay strong, but still have difficulty associating myself with that nasty term: incest.

That was back in the spring of 1993, when I taught writing courses fuelled by books like Wild Mind by Natalie Goldberg (her advice: “Go for the jugular”) and Writing for Your Life by Deena Metzger. Both women advocate learning to let go as a writer and trust that your psyche will draw out the hidden gifts of your subconscious. Wise, revelatory words or phrases can appear as raw gems during timed sessions of free association or stream-of-consciousness writing.

Whether it’s an incident you haven’t thought of in thirty years, or something someone whispered to you as a child, these uncensored fragments can be the closest thing to truth that a writer will ever encounter before the inner critic and urge to edit and control

take over.

This form of writing has been hugely healing for me, inspiring me to go ever more deeply into the muck of my past and bring it to light. This approach helped me write my as-yet-unpublished memoir No Letter in Your Pocket: Twenty Years Healing a Family Secret.

Through years of free-association writing, I have garnered the trust and faith that my words will take me where I need to go to heal, even if they lead me far from my plot- and purpose-driven goals. They have allowed me to rage upon the page, find unexpected joy, and discover archetypal influences and symbolic links between events that previously seemed to hold little meaning. Releasing my pent-up feelings through years of such writing has allowed their slow release and loosened the weight these forces once held.

Ultimately, this helped me find compassion towards my father and forgive him. It gave my manuscript a fresh voice and inspirational lift.

Admittedly, this way of writing can be scary, ugly, but the rewards of naming and taming one’s demons far outweigh the negatives. It marks an important crossing of a threshold, from fear and inaction to risk and empowerment. It is the classic “call to advenPage 23 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

ture” stage of the hero’s journey, or “opportunity to shine,” to use the feminine equivalent from Kim Hudson’s The Virgin’s Promise.

This journey has enabled me to share my story in local readings and presentations. In so doing, I discovered that people I have known for years also endured incest but never told anyone. Oh, how heartfelt words can forge bonds and help others heal.

Since those teaching days decades ago in Vancouver, I have taken separate writing workshops with Goldberg and Metzger, experiencing first-hand how risk-taking in writing can bring peace to one’s heart. I encourage everyone to reveal their fears and Shadow self in writing, whether it’s shame, guilt or dar-

ing glimpses of joy. If you need inspiration, check out Goldberg’s and Metzger’s books. Leaf through Frank Warren’s A Lifetime of Secrets: he invited people to send him anonymous postcards that reveal their deepest secret. The responses are shocking, astounding, and delightfully wry and indeed, tragic. It’s the writer’s job to reveal the world behind the mask, to bring a voice to what lies within. In healing yourself, you help heal the world.

For close to five years, I created and taught creative writing workshops to adults with mental illness on B.C.’s Sunshine Coast.

Whether they had bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, these students were eager to put to paper their experiences of bullying and

injustice, whether from an insensitive neighbour or a callous medical professional. They also wrote funny, ironic, insightful and whimsical poetry and prose.

It was clear to me that these weekly writing sessions, offered by someone outside the medical establishment, gave them a sense of freedom and safety to express themselves more openly. This was an important step in healing past hurts. At the end of each sixor eight-week course, I’d photocopy a collection of their writings and slip them into the boxes of all the mental health staff.

I believe wholeheartedly in the transformational and therapeutic power of writing. I am proof of its fundamental ability to heal. Sure, I know that detractors

and purists dismiss such unhoned stuff as self-indulgent. Yes, it can be. But as a first draft, short exercise or starting-off point, it offers tremendous freedom. I guarantee that anyone who writes this way will rarely, if ever, experience writer’s block.

Besides writing, my biggest passion is to help others use writing as their own healing tool and then share it as inspiration to others. I encourage my writing coaching clients and screenwriting students to write the stories that hold the most juice, as Goldberg says, the ones they most wish would go away. Until we give these unsightly tales a voice, they will sabotage our lives, either subtly or overtly, and keep us from being all that we can be.

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THE DOCTOR INSIDE WORDS POETRY AS HEALER

RICHARD OSLER

P

oet as spiritual physician: that’s how celebrated British novelist Jeanette sees it. That’s also how Sharon Olds describes her mentor and teacher, American poet, Muriel Rukeyser, in a poem called Physician: You believe in the healing power of words, you turn to each as she speaks, he speaks, until we are holding speech together like hands around the hard table in the difficult night.

Can you feel it, the healing nature of words as Olds describes it: until we are holding speech like hands/ around the table in the difficult night? As a poetry therapist at a drug and alcohol recovery center, how many such difficult nights I have witnessed, as poems held hands in the room.

Holding speech together like hands. How the raw words of poems, just minutes old, draw us into the circle and often stories and secrets flood out for a first time. It sometimes feels like an unhealed wound, now open to the light, can dry up and heal. In their poem someone may hear hope for the first time. Often I hear this: "I feel lighter, a sense of relief."

British writer Jay Griffiths, writing in the Guardian earlier this year says: “For me, poetry is medicine. The poet Les Murray writes: ‘I’d disapproved of using poetry as personal therapy, but the Black Dog taught me better. Get sick enough, and you’ll use any remedy you’ve got.’ ” Often, recovery clients tell me their poems have helped them on their journey to sobriety. In a large group of more than forty participants, a woman disclosed, for the first time in public, a his-

tory of sexual abuse as she read her poem, just minutes old. She did not know, when I gave the writing prompt, I Remember, that this memory would be the one to surface: I Remember I remember seeing my three-year-old sister sitting in Uncle Brian’s lap I remember thinking Uh Oh I remember walking up to the arm chair I remember tapping my sister on the leg to get her to come outside to play I remember I was four I remember the sun was shining and Aunt Gladys was vacuuming.

What a story she shared in spare, poetic words. How the chaos and disorder of her story became ordered inside the shape of this poem. And that poem held the beginnings of healing for this woman, a healing that Winterson says is real: “The healing power of art is not a rhetorical fantasy… For some, music, for some, pictures, for me, primarily, poetry… cuts through noise and hurt, opens the wound to heal it, and then gradually teaches it to heal itself.”

How is this so? Author and doctor Rachel Naomi Remen

Page 25 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

says this: “Writing poetry together heals loneliness... Poetry wears no mask. In taking off the masks we have worn to be safe, to protect ourselves, to win approval, we become less vulnerable. Less alone.

Our pain becomes just pain. It is no longer suffering.”

American poet Gregory Orr, 69, tells us how poetry has helped heal him after he killed his brother in a hunting accident when he was twelve. He describes how this was possible: “When you suffer trauma, you mostly do that passively, as a victim. But when you translate that experience into words and shape it, you become active. You are no longer a passive endurer of experience, but an active shaper of it. You’ve redeemed something from that chaos… Writing a poem can save your life…"

Griffiths, in his Guardian article claims poetry healed his depression: “I was also taking psychiatric medication, but in medicine I saw the science of pain, whereas in poetry I saw pains art. Medicine has an anesthetic relationship to pain—it wants to rid the patient of it. Poetry’s relationship is aesthetic—it wants pain to speak.”

And poetry lets pain speak. Somehow in writing a poem, I have witnessed myself, as a poet, and as a poetry therapist, poems that seem to come out of nowhere. Not controlled by the writer’s conscious mind. Canadian poet Susan Musgrave says it so well: “Poems always seem to know more than I do and to be wiser than I am, as far as I can see. That’s also what’s magical about writing. Where do these things come from?”

Using a writing prompt that came from Rukeyser—I could not tell—I saw dramatic evidence of this. A woman writing with nine others wrote a poem that took her back to a traumatic rape she had never shared before. This poet/patient told me later she had no intention of writing that story, didn’t even know it was close to the surface.

During the next twenty four hours she processed that story with a counsellor and in group sessions. She felt a tremendous sense of relief and release from that secret held for so long. She credits the poem for giving her the start at a chance at recovery.

Is there clinical research on writing as healing? Yes. Best known, James Pennebaker’s clinical research in the 1980’s proved people who wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings surrounding a traumatic event improved their physical and mental well being. Since then, researcher Laura King has expanded the kinds of writing, not just on trauma, that prove to be healing.

I discovered a poem’s healing impact directly when I began a first draft of a poem about a labyrinth. A few lines in, without notice, I was writing about my daughter’s bulimia. But it took countless revisions and two years before my locked-up feelings entered the poem, my helplessness. And I experienced deep emotional relief, a letting go. An acceptance. A poem as doctor.

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 26

Walking the Labyrinth – Early Days of Her Recovery Bulimia, a word to keep quiet in the mouth.

A word for a father to stand alone inside like a labyrinth he enters with nothing to find but the girl he knew before she learned the music bile sings off key inside a throat.

Before it bent a girl in two, priestess and victim, praying over her altar, pristine white. Before his helplessness: the weight a red towel holds, soaking wet with white flecks she will not explain.

No way in but on a slant. The path goes left, doubles back. First circles the bull’s eye it wants to reach. He follows it in. His eyes look down at the path. It gnaws away at last year’s leaves.

Just hunger finding its homeward road.

In each turn he swallows shadows, and the sound of falling inside rain as it begins and he hears inside it, a line from a poem: The small raine down can raine. But not small, this rain, as now it falls, as nails, as cats and dogs. It never fails, the day he forgets his coat the heavens open.

He is soaked through, rain enough to come alive in, rain enough for his youngest daughter to exult in, the way she used to, running out, as it poured in buckets, making a ruckus, reaching up on her toes, to a sky, hung just to be unhooked in her eyes, as she danced, arms out-flung, wild and wide: that girl, when she was three, free from any sounds of throwing up. But she’s not here and he, alone, no Theseus, walks and turns inside a labyrinth, unsure, looking for signs on the path to guide him home.

Richard Osler from Hyaena Season, Quattro Books, 2016

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Judi Lees FriesenPress, March 2016 ISBN: 9781460281611$20.49

Robert Martens Ekstasis Editions, March 2016 ISBN: 9781771711623 $23.95

If you aren't the person you thought you were, then who are you? After his wife Cassandra is killed under mysterious conditions, Lester Whittall finds his orderly life destroyed. Who killed Cassandra and why was she in that strange location are the painful questions that perplex Lester, his 22-year-old daughters and the police. When he meets travel writer Rachel Jasper, it is quickly evident that her world is the antithesis of Lester's tidy one. Her 'seize the moment' philosophy is both bewildering and delightful. Although she has family issues of her own, she doesn't let them distract her from what she thrives upon—incessant travel and male companionship. Visiting a shaman in Mexico, hiking in Australia, beguiled by the beauty of Thai and Cambodian temples— through his adventures and a growing intimacy with Rachel Lester learns much more about himself than about the foreign landscapes that he explores. Available on amazon. ca, chapter.indigo.ca, goodreads.com

In a globe usurped by the deafening forces of empire, can we find each other once again in the common spirit’s mighty hush? These poems have faith in that possibility.

A deeply touching novel with a vivid sense of place.

John MacLachlan Gray, playwright, and novelist, author of The Fiend In Human. judileeswrites.com

Robert Martens’ poems are like bread. Spare, lean and pacifist, they bring out that little bit of inner Mennonite in all of us. These are carefully carpentered works infused with the small town fuel of coffee, dreams and whisky. As always, they ring with Martens’ God-watched voice. “Instant Karma,” an antic Buddhist-Anabaptist meditation is worth the whole collection, an instant classic.

Trevor Carolan, Department of English/ Creative Writing, University of the Fraser Valley Robert Martens grew up in a village founded by Mennonite refugees from the Soviet Union. Still in his teens, he leapfrogged several centuries into the postmodern milieu of student politics at Simon Fraser University. Robert subsequently settled in Abbotsford, BC, where he writes poems and enjoys the spoiled existence of the wealthy West. He has co-written and co-edited histories, anthologies, and periodicals. Robert is grateful for poetry, music, movies, friends and family, and for his cat, who sleeps soundly through the injustices of this world. hush can be ordered at ekstasiseditions.com

Page 27 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

The House of Wives

Bucked Off

Teeth, Lies & Consequences

Simon Choa-Johnston Penguin Canada, May 2016 ISBN: 9780670069477 $24.95

Joyce Helweg Self-published, July 2016 ISBN: 9780987959126 $26.00

Dan Green

Two women compete for the affections of their opium merchant husband in a tale of friendship, fortune and rivalry in colonial Hong Kong

This is more than a story of a grieving widow finding the courage to get back in the saddle and ride. This is a collection of stories that will appeal to history buffs, readers experiencing grief and those just needing a good laugh. It is a diverse collection of stories of a man and woman that shared a life filled with adventure, joy and laughter.

The author had lived through grief before. She had learned the five steps of grief and knew she had to find a better way to survive. She singled out one survival technique. She knew that everyone had to help each other through the pain.

On March 20, 2014 her husband died suddenly of an aortic aneurism. In a struggle to survive his death she created a plan. She would accept help from all that offered, not refuse any travel invitation and deal with each emotion as it arose by journalizing her feelings. For the first year she wrote letters to her husband and reminisced through stories of their life together. She struggled through the special occasions they would no longer share.

Her goal was to emerge with a manuscript of healing. This is that manuscript.

When renowned German dentist, Friedrich Mueller, is discovered concealing his Jewish ancestry, he must compromise his ideals and take a secret oath to avoid the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Compelled to leave their beloved country, Friedrich and his wife, Eva, make a perilous journey to the promised land of Palestine. They open a dental practice in the heart of the Old City, determined to promote equality, tolerance and reconciliation. When sectarian war engulfs them in 1948, they are forced to seek refuge in California with their one-year-old adopted son, Frankie. After growing up to become a Hollywood superstar dentist, Frankie's life spins off the rails. He skips bail and flees to Gaza to reconnect with his lost Arabic heritage. When he is arrested as a terrorist and charged with murder, Friedrich is faced with revealing his secret to save the life of his son.

In 1862, a young Jew from Calcutta named Emanuel Belilios leaves his dutiful wife Semah and sets sail for Hong Kong to make his fortune in the opium trade. There, he grows into a prosperous and respectable merchant, eventually falling in love with his Chinese business partner's daughter Pearl, a delicate beauty twenty years his junior. As a wedding present, he builds for her the most magnificent mansion in Hong Kong. Then Semah arrives unannounced from Calcutta to take her place as mistress of the house...and life will change irrevocably for all of them.

Inspired by the lives of Choa-Johnston's ancestors, The House of Wives is an unforgettable novel about the machinations of the early opium trade, and about two remarkable women determined to secure a dynasty for their children in the tumultuous British Crown colony.

Price includes shipping in Canada. Book can be ordered online at joycehelwegauthor.com or send cheque or money order to Joyce Helweg, Box 415, Fort St. James, BC V0J 1P0

Winter 2017 â—† WordWorks â—† Page 28

Createspace.com, October 2016 ISBN: 97815375296771 $20.00

Dan Green graduated as a Doctor of Dental Medicine from the University of Manitoba in 1969. After retiring from private practice in 2003, he studied creative writing at the University of British Columbia. He is an active member of the Canadian Authors Association, the Federation of BC Writers and the Palm Springs Writers Guild.

On the Arts

The Extra Cadaver Murder

Naomi Beth Wakan Pacific Rim Publishers, October, 2016 ISBN: 9780921358435 $25.00

Roy Innes

On the Arts is a collection of personal essays built around a number of articles first published in Still Point Quarterly Art magazine.

They cover a wide range of topics from an exploration of what art and creativity might be, to bel canto, flamenco, flower arranging and calligraphy.

RCMP Inspector Coswell is back in The Extra Cadaver Murder. A university professor is garroted and his corpse is discovered in spectacular fashion—nude on a slab alongside shrouded medical cadavers prepared for a first year anatomy class. The Inspector begins his investigation with Corporal James, his longtime assistant, but is abruptly assigned a new partner: Corporal Bostock, a female officer who arrives under a political cloud. Already depressed by his perceived plunge into senility, Coswell struggles to stifle his own gender biases and work with his new colleague. As they delve into the victim’s affairs, the list of suspects grows: failed students, a jealous colleague, an alluring ex-wife, and even a criminal cartel.

The city of Vancouver is highlighted as the officers follow clues that take them to the downtown with its gourmet restaurants, Stanley Park, spectacular English Bay, the sprawling UBC campus, and the Vancouver General Hospital.

Naomi Beth Wakan's On the Arts should come with a health warning for one is left breathless coming to the last page. Although she describes herself as an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy she turns out to be anything but. She is a whirlwind, a tornado, and the reader is swept along by the energy of her enthusiasms and her erudite interests. One is taken from Pearl Harbour to the Met.; from flower arranging to flamenco dancing; from making matzo balls to making fakes! Her enjoyment of creativity in its multitudinous forms is magnetic and one is left with endless ideas to hammer out at dinner parties or in the local pub; with a book list of 'must reads' that will take one over more than a summer holiday; and one will never be able to see things in quite the same light anymore.

Ruth Artmonsky, Design Historian, Do you want it good or do you want it Tuesday?

naomiwakan.com

NeWest Press, October, 2016 ISBN: 9781926455723 $15.95

Roy Innes’s offbeat humour, clever characterization, and crisp plotting make for non-stop reading.

Garry Ryan, author of Indiana Pulcinella and Glycerin

Confessions of an Inadvertently Gentrifying Soul Bill Engleson Silver Bow Publishing October 2016 ISBN: 9781927616222 $23.95 Bill Engleson’s second book, Confessions of an Inadvertently Gentrifying Soul, is a compilation of literary essays, many singed with humour, spiked with curiosity and harmoniously seasoned with the speckled band of satire. Collectively, they examine the novelist, poet, and essayist’s transformation from confident urban dweller to somewhat mortified rural denizen. Propelled by tonguefirmly-planted-in-cheeky-self-deprecating guilt, Engleson offers pungently droll, consistently perceptive commentary on the curious customs of his adopted rural community, Denman Island. From almost the first moment he plopped his flip-flopping feet on its rough and tumble shores, Engleson was compelled to seek answers to a most vexation question: Why am I here?Each essay serves to slowly reveal to him and to his new-found hamlet that there might not be an actual answer.

Nevertheless, as Jack Hodgins, winner of the 2006 Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence and 2009 inductee into the Order of Canada, says, “the chapter titles tell us much. Turnip Love. Up and Down the Garbage Chute. In fact, the table of contents alone may put a smile on your face that will last the whole time you are reading the book…” Find out more about Bill’s writings at engleson.ca and/or order his book at: silverbowpublishing.com/confessions-of-aninadvertently-gentrifying-soul.html

Page 29 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

Cherished Secrets

Blood Orange

The Boy from Under

C.B. Clark The Wild Rose Press, October, 2016 ISBN: 9781927823521 $15.95

Heidi Garnett Frontenac House, October, 2016 ISBN: 9781927823521 $15.95

Craig Spence Direct to Web, October 2016 pay-as-you-know, $7.50

Twelve years ago, sixteen-year old Carrie Ann Hetherington, pregnant with the child of a murder suspect, fled the small town of Cooper’s Ridge for the anonymity of Seattle. Now, faced with a family dilemma, she must risk her carefully reinvented life and return to her childhood home.

Eighteen-year-old Declan McAllister’s prom date is found beaten and strangled to death, and he becomes the prime suspect accused of the grisly crime. Now this successful Dallas businessman returns to Cooper’s Ridge to find the true murderer and finally lift the cloak of suspicion he’s faced all these years. In his quest to prove his innocence, he must join forces with the woman who shattered his heart to find a devious killer who will stop at nothing to protect a shocking truth.

Blood Orange ponders the resilience of the human spirit as it explores the meaning of home (Heimat) and homelessness, and circles themes such as forced displacement and loss. Memory is interrogated, but never completely trusted as the poems shift back and forth between post-war Poland and western Canada, the past and present day and other unnameable time frames. Life and death, eros and thantos intermingle in a world in which a mother braids her child’s hair with hands of smoke and “where there is nowhere to sit comfortably” or feel safe, a world in which one is forever a refugee and without legitimate citizenship.

I have just posted my latest novel The Boy From Under online. It’s a mystery-thriller about a Vancouver lawyer whose upscale lifestyle starts unravelling in a perfect emotional and psychological storm when he takes on the case of would-be divorcé Maria Selkirk, the wife of a Vancouver area crime boss; he's then haunted by a disturbing CBC news item about the unsolved case of Crystal Doer, an Abbotsford teen, who went missing in August, 1972.

Heidi Garnett was born near Gdansk (Danzig) during the Second World War. Her poems have been published in literary journals and anthologies across Canada, in England and in California. She was shortlisted for the Arvon prize in London and runner-up for the Rattle prize in Los Angeles. In addition she has won the Descant Winston Collins prize and placed or been shortlisted in poetry contests sponsored by Canada Writes, Arc, Antigonish Review, Fiddlehead, CV2, Freefall and Room. She was awarded the Timothy Findlay scholarship by Humber College for her fiction work and included in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, ed. Stephanie Bolster, in 2008.

She graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC Okanagan in 2010.

This novel is available online for anyone with access to a computer, tablet or mobile phone.

In a new departure for me, it’s presented in a ‘pay-as-you-know’ format, that is, you don’t buy the online book—for $7.50 — until you’re sure the story grabs you and you’re ready to support the author (that would be me) in his undending quest to write more fiction.

Caught up in a menacing web of secrets, deception and danger, they struggle to overcome past betrayals and present danger. Can they tear down the barriers they’ve erected around their hearts and rediscover true love?

C.B. Clark grew up in Canada’s Northwest Territories and Yukon. Graduating with a degree in Anthropology and Archaeology, she has worked as an archaeologist and an educator, teaching students from the primary grades through the first year of college. She currently resides in Quesnel.

Her first novel, My Brother’s Sins was published in February by TWRP and placed first in the Music City Romance Writers Competition.

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 30

As the story unfolds, it becomes obvious Victor won’t have a future until he can figure out his past, and confront the demons undermining his present tense.

Follow the link and ENJOY!

craigspencewriter.ca/creative-writes/publishedworks/boy-from-under/

Here and There Coloring Book

The Gift: Betrayal

Loreena M Lee November 2016 $15.00

J.P. McLean WindStorm Press, November 2016 ISBN: 9781988125091 $19.99

22 pages of travel sketches from places like Greece, Portugal, Spain and Canada have been translated into images for a new coloring book. Taken from almost 300 sketches made during visits to these countries which were included in my journals. And for a little added fantasy and change of pace, a couple of sweet dragons.

Vengeance for the Forsaken . . .

What would you do if your wife left you for your worst enemy, and then proceeded to empty your bank account? When Jackson Delaney learns that his wife betrayed him for his half-brother, nothing less than revenge will quench the fire in his soul. But first he has to find them.

Jackson joins forces with an unlikely partner—his wife’s brother. They put aside their warring motives, and dive headlong into a search that will test their characters and break the laws of two worlds. And when Jackson meets Emelynn Taylor, a mysterious young woman with no knowledge of her arcane and powerful gift, he recklessly lures her into his vengeful mission.

But nothing is what it seems, and from a single deception grows a web of strangling lies.

Contact Loreena Lee at: loreena@dragonlee. ca to purchase

J.P. (Jo-Anne) McLean lives on Denman Island and features the west coast in her contemporary fantasy thrillers. The first book in her Gift Legacy Series, The Gift: Awakening recently earned an Honorable Mention at the Whistler Independent Book Awards. The Gift: Betrayal is a retelling of Awakening from a different character’s perspective. You can contact J.P. at jpmclean.net.

Story Structure Expedition: Journey to the Heart of a Story PJ Reece Rolling West Productions, October 2016 ISBN: 9780995323506 $9.95 US Does the story heart exist? And if so, where is it, and how do we get there? Is it true you have to die to reach the heart?

In Story Structure Expedition, the author becomes the reluctant protagonist on a jungle river journey to every story’s destination—the crisis of utter failure. But it’s also the turning point where heroes undergo a radical change of heart.

Packed with quotes from poets and mystics, this faux-memoir-novella can be summed up by Henry Miller who famously said, “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”

Reece offers a ton of powerful insight into the pain of transformation… lots of food for thought, both for writing and possibly for life. author, K.M. Weiland It's a story within a story within a story, with surprises layered like a Russian doll.

Tony Kendrew, associate editor, Lampeter Review “Can a penetrating look at what makes great fiction also be laugh-out-loud hilarious? You bet.”

Amazon reviewer PJ Reece has been a working writer for 25 years.

He has scripted documentaries for most of the big networks including National Geographic, Discovery Channel, CBC, Bravo! and A&E. Along the way he published two novels. Reece’s blog takes issue with the conventional wisdom that stifles the writing world.

Page 31 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Winter 2017

MEMBER CLASSIFIEDS A COUNTRY GIRL A BESTSELLING EROTIC NOVEL

BY JEANNE AINSLIE IS NOW AVAILABLE ON AMAZON KINDLE

The Girl from Old Nichol Betty Annand Amberjack Publishing, New York, New York, December 2016, ISBN: 9780997237795 $15.99 US Betty Annand has resided in the Comox Valley for the past eighty years and is well-known for her comedy plays and local interest books, Voices from Bevan, and Voices from Courtenay Past. The Girl from Old Nichol is her first novel.

The novel is historical fiction about a girl named Gladys who was born in Old Nichol, one of the poorest slum districts in London in 1829. Having alcoholic parents who were too sick to look after her, Gladys learned to survive by begging and stealing. She was eventually forced to commit a crime so dire that she had to flee for her life.

She soon learned that life away from the slums could be just as miserable, and if it wasn’t for the help and advice of a friend she met, she may not have survived. Gladys works as a chambermaid and a barmaid before her talent as a singer is discovered. She meets many colourful characters, some kind and caring and some cruel and selfish. The most difficult thing Gladys has to contend with is class distinction, which was unheard of in Old Nichol.

Betty has also written a sequel titled The Woman from Dover, which will be released in October 2017. amberjackpublishing.com/authors/betty-annand/

Winter 2017 ◆ WordWorks ◆ Page 32

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