the fears of reading

As I mentioned earlier, I’ll be reading from my The M Word essay on Thursday night at Russell Books. I’ll be honest with you, I’m fairly nervous. Nervous because, while usually I love to read my work and know I can give a good performance, I’ve only ever read poetry. Not only this is prose, this is memoir-prose. And it’s not funny, or light. No, the essay I’m reading, “What Can’t Be Packed Away” is about loss.

Here I am in the airport, writing this, after a rush visit with my parents in my home town. Rushed, because my father was brought to emergency late Thursday night with heart failure. He’s home now, much better than the when he went in, but I will tell you that when rereading my essay to see what sections to read on Thursday night, I have a pang of guilt.

In the essay, which is largely about the fear of loss of my children, I wrote:

My father has been diagnosed with a terminal neurological condition. He is seventy-six. I know I should feel sadder than I do, but I can’t help but think: yes, this is how it should be. We hate to use the term, “old,” but yes, he is old. He is elderly. Of course, we would like another ten or twenty years with him, but I can’t help but whisper gratitude to the universe for choosing him over one of my children. This is how my superstition works.

And now, here I am, leaving from seeing my father so close to his own death to read to a group of strangers from this essay, I feel uneasy. It will be difficult reading an essay that explores the death of children I knew and the imagined deaths of my own children with this paragraph and my recent experience with my father so fresh. Frankly, it feels like I’m tempting fate.

I’m not shy about death. I think we need to talk about it in the world much more than we do, that we need to open about grief and loss. It is the only thing in life that unites us—we will face the deaths of those we love, we will die ourselves.

I’m reading Wallace Stegner’s All The Little Live Things right now and there is a lot about death in the book, a lot of talk and philosophizing. There are about two pages worth of quotes I’d like to copy out for you, but I’ve chosen this:

“It’s right there should be death in the world, it’s as natural as being born. We’re all apart of a big life pool, and we owe the world the space we fill and the chemicals we’re made of. Once we admit it’s not an abstraction, but something we do personally owe, it shouldn’t be hard.”

I don’t agree with Stegner’s character Marian, here. I think it death is always hard (though hard isn't the right word, either), but I think there should be more ways in this world to help us with death. Death doulas, choices, and more rituals/ceremonies, but this is a big topic and one for an essay, I think.

Now, I hope I haven’t scared you off coming to the reading tomorrow night. The M Word is an exceptional anthology, so many important essays in it. Please come and join the conversation.

on fear of confrontation

On Thursday night, I had my first official reading from Glossolalia. I read in Vernon with Hannah Calder (who didn't have any books to sell as her publisher didn't get them to her on time. I was so disappointed as her reading was fantastic and I'm very intrigued by More House) and the always excellent Laisha Rosnau was our host.

I've read from the collection before, but as I mentioned previously this was the first time I'd read from the actual book. At first I wasn't nervous. I'd had a glass of wine and we decided that Hannah should go first as she had a friend in the audience who had to take off early in the night. I'd chosen five poems to read and I had read them all before and knew I could do them well. I felt confident and happy.

Then I stepped behind the podium and began to read.

There were a few friendly faces in the audience--Laisha, her husband Aaron, Hannah, and Lainna (a friend from my Edmonton days who has now relocated to Kelowna)--and most of the people I didn't know were attentive and generous.

But there were two men in the audience who stood out to me. The first man was an older gentleman who, I was later told, came right into the space, asked for my book, bought it, and then sat in the corner waiting for the reading to begin. He was attentive, even closed his eyes as I read. He disappeared as soon as the reading was done and I wish I had the gumption to approach him before he left. He seemed connected to the poetry and I had assumed he was a regular attendee at this reading series, but no one had seen him before.

The second man who stood out was younger, possibly early thirties. He seemed, well, intense. I also wish I had been brave enough to approach him afterwards, but he made me nervous. While I was reading, I kept looking at him as he stared at me, and it split my focus, made me wonder if this man was Mormon or polygamous, or perhaps even both. The latter two are unlikely, but the LDS have a large population in both BC and Alberta.

I know eventually it's going to happen, most likely at a reading. My fear is that I will offend people of this faith despite taking much care not to in the writing of the book. Although I've taken the lives of the polygamous wives of Joseph Smith as inspiration for this book, it's not meant to be read as biography or history. It's fiction. It's poetry. It's much more about my own experiences/insecurities/fears about motherhood and marriage than it is about Mormonism.

After the reading, there was a Q&A and I was certain that the man was going to stand up and accuse me of appropriation or blasphemy or...something. I'm not completely sure. And then there was a very tiny part of me that worried he was some sort of fundamental fringe Mormon who believed in and was planning on practising blood atonement. But the man was silent and he also left soon after the reading ended.

When I arrived home from our trip into the interior, there was a large envelope in our mailbox. The return address was from Utah. Kevin handed it to me and said, "And so it begins." My heart leaped to my throat before I remembered that I had ordered this from the brilliant Trent Nelson.

I'm dreading the first confrontation, but part of me hopes it happens sooner rather than later, just so that I can deal with it, learn from it, and move on. Am I being pessimistic? Or even egotistical? It's poetry for goodness sake, does it even show up on the radar? Ultimately, I hope that Glossolalia will find readers, and in that crowd (oh, please let it be a crowd and not just a handful), there will be people who are connected to the Mormon faith. Will I ever even know? I hope so, but time will tell.

When you are a young woman and your body becomes a reminder of tragedy, how can you ever come to love it?

"'When you are a young woman and your body becomes a reminder of tragedy, how can you ever come to love it?' I wrote in that secluded cabin in Banff. 'You yourself become a crime scene — a place of mourning you carry with you every day. Something tolerated, hated or, most commonly, ignored. I am happy for those people who see the body as a tool of empowerment, a vessel for pleasure and strength, but I’ve had to unlearn mine as a site of violence out of necessity.'"

from Stacey May Fowles's fantastic What Can't Be Published in the National Post. (There was so much in this essay that I wanted to quote, it was hard to choose a section that didn't end up quoting multiple paragraphs. This is an important essay. Please read it.)