On the Threshold: Writing Toward the Year 2000

Notes

INTRODUCTION

May, 1993—We are sitting in Janice Kirk’s kitchen, warmed not just by the coffee, but also by the glow of the hardwood floors she refinished with her father, and by the slightly stronger May sun and the first promise of Janice’s garden beyond the large window.

We have met as a writing group since the winter and are thinking about where we wanted to go from here. We are all mothers; we are all literary. Anne and Elizabeth teach English at Queen’s University; Mary, a librarian, is new to Kingston (she and Tara went to university together in Regina). Tara, a former journalist, currently works in a bookstore part time and supervises the playground at a neighbourhood school. Janice, who has graduated from university with a degree in Drama, is working as a house painter. We are lazy with good food, sunlight and the ease of being together. Then Elizabeth says, Why don’t we do an anthology? On the end of the millennium, say, writing toward the year 2000. We could apply for an Explorations grant; we could send calls for submissions all over Canada; we could ask people we know to send us things.

In the spring warmth and sunlight, in the quiet of Janice’s kitchen, this seems like a good idea. Somehow, making it come true turns out to be much harder than just saying it. We look in our backyards for a name, and find one in a deep pink foxglove, growing among violets. As the newly-formed Foxglove Collective we meet during the summer over potluck lunches and try to put together our application for the Explorations grant. We don’t get it, but are invited to resubmit. Over the winter, we sharpen our application. When we send it off the second time, we feel that we have answered the assessor’s objections and that we see much more clearly where we’re going. We’re jubilant when we get the grant and celebrate with a party at Anne’s country home.

Later that summer (1994) we send out hundreds of calls for submissions from the Northwest Territories to Newfoundland. We invite writers we know, from Kingston and elsewhere, to send us their work. At Christmas we invite friends and writers to help launch our project with a reading at Kim Ondaatje’s Blue Roof Farm, candlelit for this occasion, and follow this with two more readings the next spring at Elizabeth’s and at Anne’s.

Spring 1995. We have more than 300 manuscripts from all over Canada. We are suddenly much busier. Anne has left Queen’s and is beginning a new career as a musician; Mary has a new baby, Thomas; Tara is working nearly fulltime at the bookstore; Janice has become house manager at a local repertory cinema. We pass manuscripts around in shopping bags, but finding an hour a week—or a month—when we can all meet seems like Utopia. At the outset, we decide on our process: each of us will read each submission independently before we discuss it. Somehow, the manuscript gets selected and put in order. We send it off in the fall of 1997 and are delighted when Beach Holme accepts it.

February, 1999. Updating the introduction is the last thing we have to do before publication. The beginning of this book seems very far away, in a distinctly different world. As we complete our part of readying the manuscript for publication, we feel in the middle of a fifty-ring circus.

Anne is now performing frequently on the flute or other instruments, as well as teaching both music and writing. Mary has moved to Ottawa. Elizabeth has retired from Queen’s, has become an alternate healer, and is working on a collection of short fiction. Janice is astonished to find herself in the civil service. Tara is becoming known as a Kingston writer.

It is one of those ironic gaps between art and life that a collage of our five lives gives a different picture of the age from the one presented in these pages. For the five of us, life at the end of the millennium is juggling work, meetings, partners, motherhood and writing. Increasingly our juggling includes politics. We all live fragmented lives bound together by webs of love and necessity. We all feel that some of the things we cherish have been eroded: schools, health care, social assistance, the environment, the arts. When we consider public policy, especially, we appreciate the force of Louise O’Donnel’s lines:

Am I a cantankerous old woman

or did I fall asleep

and wake up in the wrong millennium?

II

Peter Matthiessen writes in The Snow Leopard that when he began his journey to the Crystal Monastery in Tibet his spiritual advisor, the Eido Roshi, suggested he expect nothing. We may have thought we were following this Zen advice when we sent out calls for submissions, but when the manuscripts came in, we were still somewhat surprised that so few of them were political or predictive. It is true that the social climate of Canada has changed radically in the relatively short time since our deadline for manuscripts; it is also true that some of the pieces in this book are sharply critical of these millennial years: Louise O’Donnell’s Cantankerous, Louise Karch’s Uniforms, Stephanie Marshall’s Is That So Much?, Jocko Benoit’s Bosch’s Beasts, Gabrielle Santyr’s Circular Arguments, Kate Barker’s The Applicant and Shannon Campbell’s Myrtle are among the poems and stories that engage with the callousness and grittiness of the nineties in a way that we might have expected.

But other writers like Louise Simon in Competence, John B. Lee in And It Was Hard Times and Alfred Edwards in Uncle Peter look back to hard times that either their ancestors or they, as children, survived. In looking back to the past, they define the present. Terry Watada tells both his own and his father’s story in Message in a Bottle. Other writers find the present in the past through art: Patience Wheatley in Frances is Pregnant and Eric Folsom in The Jack Pine recover Canadian painters Frances Hopkins and Tom Thomson. Steven Heighton, translating Emile Nelligan’s Ship of Gold, also gives a renewed voice to one of our poetic ancestors. Liliane Welch catches the agelessness of stories in her poem Winter Evenings and suggests an imaginative continuity through periods of historical or political change. Michael Crummey and George Piggford comment on the age through elegies for Bronwen Wallace, an unmet mentor, and Simon, a friend.

As might be expected, some of our writers define our place in time through space and landscape, as do Kenneth Sherman in his poem Landscape, Mary Cameron in Fields and Margaret Smart in Kate on Bloor.

The notion of family is changing as we approach the millennium. While Luranah Polson’s poem, Revolution, speaks to this metamorphosis, it is not overtly apparent in most of the writing here. Peggy Fletcher’s Sherry of the Nineties shows a daughter tough enough to stand her ground in a male world. Carrie Anne Snyder’s Pilgrimage is a homage to Alice Munro and an affirmation of a middle-aged mother’s right to change, but most of the other families depicted here are traditional. The family may not be perfect, but most of the writers haven’t found a substitute. Irene, in Mary Borsky’s story The Short-Wave Radio, lives in her brother’s shadow and goes to humourous extremes to find her place in the sun. Ann Copeland’s Lace Collar is an elegy for the narrator’s mother and a vanished way of life. Rachel Wyatt’s The Colonel’s Wife suggests the sort of twists and turns in marriage and family so common in the mid and late century and contains some of the most beautiful dahlias we have ever seen.

Bronwen Wallace says in Keep That Candle Burning Bright that everyone has a driving story. We have four such journeys: Christopher Wiseman’s Crossing the Salt Flats, Rosemary Blake’s Driving Home in a Snowstorm, Catherine Greenwood’s Reaching the Frontier and Joan Givner’s Stage Directions.

Many poems and stories in this anthology remind us that in spite of cuts and deficits and crises, moments of peace can still be found. Marilyn Gear Filling’s Heading for the Millennium: Seven Easter Stories, Patricia Nolan’s It Has A Place For Rabbits and Stan Dragland’s Devil Rock recreate the sort of everyday moments which, end of millennium or not, still make up much of our lives. Cheryl Sutherland’s D-Day reminds us of the long shadow WWII casts, even fifty years later, as well as the problems many people face at the end of the century when they live in a new culture, in a new language.

Some pieces, like Anna Mioduchowska’s The New Human Being and D. G. Jones’ Fin de jour, fin d’année, fin de siecle measure what we’ve lost and suggest that our age is darkened by a sense of endings. Michael Gelfand’s Millennium depicts a century ending in violence. Joanne Page in The Edge is Always Arbitrary shows how old expectations fall away and new beginnings are possible. This is the location of reversals…where…it only makes sense to move toward the light.

When a gap opens between old and new, as it does at the threshold of the millennium, culture enters a twilight state of ambiguity and openness. Here we may step outside the norm, abandon our usual roles, and enter into an entirely new relationship with ourselves and our community. Sharron Chatterton’s The Millennia shows a global movement toward unity and connectedness. Kent Nussey’s essay, This Is the Muzak Apocalypse, reminds us that in the mid and late twentieth century, music is inseparable from personal and larger histories as well as a thread into the maze of the next age. Paddy McCallum’s Dominion Code suggests through ice (what else?) a connection between past and future.

Some writers enter a timeless or mythic space: David Groulx in The Sky is Bleak and Harmony, Malca Litovitz in Red Riding Hood, Beryl Baigent in Tellurian and Meira Cook in Rumours of Bear. These myth poems, as much as anything else, seem to lead us past the fin de siecle darkness, the divisiveness and the violence, toward a more hopeful age.

WINTER EVENINGS

by Liliane Welch

Where are the old books

images that glittered in childhood

each winter evening during the war

when everyone waited to be free

the end of cold days

composed then with a story

between shadows on the strawberry wallpaper

gathering the tick of a grandfather clock

my mother on the button leather sofa

unwinding skeins of wool

from my wrists into bright balls

or where is the history of distant stars

resurrected by the night or those legends

that blow open the entrance to another world and

unknown words coursing within the room

its old fashioned sewing machine

the repetitive lives of women blissfully adrift

amidst drowsy cats on sideboards

the garden steaming outside

or what tales dispense now the voice of wonder

that asks to depart

FRANCES IS PREGNANT

by Patience Wheatley

London galleries

want romantic, descriptive art,

history of people in action

voyageurs, travellers, traders, priests,

you know that kind of thing.

I’ve sent it before

even sold pictures

although I am a woman.

Now, I send you this drawing Mother,

you, who understand me, may see

beauty as it strikes

this bud flaring wide

releasing silken leaves

like a fountain’s arcs

palest of sunset green

orange bud scales

curled back, stretched wide open

this shagbark hickory

a new tree from a new country

bearing sweet nuts in autumn.

I am happy, Mother.

I send you this drawing.

from Space Mirror, a long poem for Frances Hopkins:

Canadian Painter 1838—1919

THE JACK PINE

by Eric Folsom

everything had a shape

each shape had a place and a texture

strokes of green, apricot, indigo

the realness of paint going

up against rock, cold water

as in Spring Ice and In The Northland

Thomson used the brush like an axe

to shape the trees, recast the land

precision

colour, composition and light

then his waterlogged body

dragged from Canoe Lake

anonymously, quietly, nature morte

the later Jack Pines were painted and pruned

Varley’s feathery charmer, Lismer’s

sculpted sentinel four-square in the rocks

the style was set, outlines positioned

colours chosen and textures applied

show me the photograph of Tom fishing

anybody’s lost brother or cousin

show me the shack behind the old Severn Street

Studio Building in Toronto

the rough shed where Tom lived and worked

perpetually short of cash

we might see him still, feeding broken sticks

rejected sketches, bits of the future

into the flame of an old Quebec heater

FIELDS

by Mary Cameron

In daylight we appear out of nowhere,

walk into orchards, fields of dying trees.

The cooling lake is a mirror

reflecting sky to itself, the fallen

lie towards the earth, red and shattered

fruit: light breaks through outer

skins where birds pulled flesh

through torn openings, drew apple

from the shape in a flurry of wings

taken up in the air. The birds

leave us on earth with seeds,

imaginings. We can only listen

for the lake’s insistent murmurs,

the torn fruit lit from within

with their own ruin.

AND IT WAS HARD TIMES

by John B. Lee

Stumping the field

when the loam was deep

deeper yet than a man could see

into a well with the light of the sun on his shoulder

but the soil would sink

with the weight of the working

and the garden would die with use

and grow nothing

while the ghosts of horses were plodding

beneath an apple crop

so heavy the branches drooped

in the pull

but back to the trees

where you measure the worth of the land

in oak

or shore your hands in willow weeds

and thorn stands

that hang with lightless hives

of paper wasps

humming summer vespers from a book of chants

or poplar slender grieving sisters

of the shallow stream

we cleared them all

and seeded the earth

between their cut tracts

where the geld-bulls grazed their horns

and shat to drag the tall logs off the work.

And it was hard times

when the colleens brought home

bear cubs

to play in the cleared yard

and the sow cracked the wilds

to take them back

or the poor sick widow

rose to give the Shawnee

the brave side of a broom

or the gran came with his black-thorn cane

to rock away the moon

like a field stone lit by fire on one side

while the brush wolves lapped lamb’s blood

and howled away the wind-cast shadows

like mad artists

blacks and greys on their brushes.

Now the woman hoes pale asters

in a fear of bees

the peach crop

fails with peach sap

like glass chips hard in the fruit

and