the VERSeFest 2014 schedule is now online,

The schedule for the fourth annual VERSeFest, Ottawa's annual poetry festival, is now on-line. Running from March 25 to 30, 2014, VERSeFest is comprised of various literary and spoken-word reading series (including The Factory Reading Series) collaborating to organize and host a wide-ranging poetry event, featuring readings and performances from Mary Ruefle, David W. McFadden, Brandon Wint, Marilyn Irwin, Margaret Christakos, Stephen Brockwell, Andrew Faulkner, Blaize Moritz, Billie Jane Kearns, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Jenna Tenn-Yuk, Kathryn Mockler, Karen Connolly, Kaie Kellough, Mary Pinkoski, Nina Berkhout, Peter Richardson, Shane Rhodes, Flilosi-Fire, Sarah De Leeuw, Souvankham Thammavongsa, Stephen James Smith, Sue Goyette, Suzannah Showler and others, a screening of Robert McTavish's documentary on the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, The Line has Shattered, as well as a post-screening panel discussion with McTavish and conference participants Roy MacSkimming, Robert Hogg and William Hawkins.

For a full schedule and list of readers, as well as information on tickets, check out their website.

Sarah de Leeuw, geographies of a lover

53055’06.72”N 122043’39.25”W

this tender wound is my missing your body, standing on a lake shore with the sun at my back, my shadow-outline fractured into filaments and halo shards broken into summer fattened fish i dissolve into thick overlapping scales, protective but useless against a hurt that is nothing at all, the nothing of emptiness gaping between rock edges torn apart from millennia of seismic shuddering, of sky wedges visible between red cedar roots upended and hurtled into driftwood with tide stripped-back bark, the nothing of the unlit moon when it rises far from full and we simply trust that what is not visible exists, like you, not here with your hips settling against my lower back you not here with your thumb in my mouth you not here with your hand resting between my upper thighs and you are not a river during break-up full against banks straining through muscled ice blocks nor are you the wrist-thick sturdy roots of water lilies wedged firmly into muskeg bogs warm below the line of decomposition, you are certainly not and this aches.

Prince George, British Columbia writer Sarah de Leeuw’s second book and first poetry collection, geographies of a lover (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2012), predominantly constructed of poems with latitudes and longitudes, is reminiscent of Monty Reid’s own collection writing out specific Alberta same in The Alternate Guide (Red Deer College Press, 1995). 

A first and second place winner in the Creative Non-Fiction category of the CBC Literary Award, de Leeuw [see her 12 or 20 questions here] is also the author of the magnificent non-fiction title Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2004) [see my review of such here]. Composed in eight sections—distance, place, topography, scale, mapping, contour lines, borderlands and north—de Leeuw’s first trade poetry collection twists the idea of the traditional ‘poems of place,’ skirting above specific site references still as fixed as anything, if you know how to read them.

53055’06.72”N 122043’39.25”W

no one is needed, the horizon a sunset against red osier dogwood or cranberry bogs or the rushing sap of vine maples, bleeding times and i am digging in, deep, under the skin slick as deer fat the freshness of meat hanging ripe guts left in coils on rainforest moss and lichens bristly short-haired and tender with everything i bring myself to rusted waters coloured from tannin i lie back with the gorged body of a tick full from burrowing, we know ourselves better than anyone, a slip down around and into shedding, the deep brown of arbutus bark sloughing slowly as the trunk expands, rhythmic and alone.

In a sequence of physical and emotional geographies, de Leeuw fully and unapologetically embraces the lyric, writing a sequence of prose poems that lick and stretch across the surface of a variety of skins. She writes most of her titles in a geographic specificity that doesn’t reference inside the body of each piece, much like poet Gil McElroy’s temporal displacements in his ongoing “Julian Days” series, replacing de Leeuw’s latitude and longitude with dates of the Julian Calendar. Through the process, they might tell you what happened, but you might not know where, or even when. The poems flow into each other, and the section titles are but poems themselves, each section mapped out with section-title poem written as more linear, more narrative, writing out as Greek Chorus might, before the action of the section/scene gets underway.

MAPPING

Four feet of snow have fallen overnight, the temperature dipping below minus 34 and falling.

A new terrain is born, uncharted lands between my front door and the sidewalk’s edge. Old markers have vanished. I am directionless as I shovel, reduced to guessing where lawn meets driveway, where road meets property line.

Forty-nine days have passed since we made love and then you returned home.

You have since sent me photos of your holidays. I stare at your four-year-old daughter. She painted her fingernails gold. Her grandfather looks like you. In one image, on a bookcase to his left, is a photo of you with your wife, both younger.

I clear a path, shoveling to uncover details stored in memory. The scar beneath your bottom lip. The darkened trail of hair down your abdomen, wet from lying in my bathtub. The tips of your cuspid teeth. The dips of skin between your fingers.

Atlases were once my favorite books. Legends comprised of symbols that made perfect sense and little dogs of all the places I would travel.

The rarity of rhumb lines, stoic in their precision. If I lost confidence I could follow their constancy to the ends of this earth.

Sarah de Leeuw’s geographies of a lover is very much a collection wrapped around a singular construct, mapping out the lyric moments of an affair, nearly as a poetic travelogue. Opening with a quote from Ottawa writer Elizabeth Smart’s novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down And Wept, another book of a steamy, illicit love with a married man, de Leeuw’s narrator writes out her own love, with a far better ending for her narrator than Smart’s, writing, in the poem “NORTH,” “Your wife and children are no longer a magnetized pull home. // I am no longer an expedition.” But what exactly is this? Whatever story this is, there are elements of difficulty in sympathy for a woman who waits for a married man to tear himself away from wife and children, for the sake of an illicit love. Hers is a highly charged and erotic text that drives the point home, deep, in the earth, writing a passionate embrace between silent stretches, ending with the slightest hint of doubt, as the final poem ends, writing: “ii am left sliced open on my back dripping cum flows towards ground to the san andreas fault line, faulted, my fault but, still, you will leave me, without a doubt.” Is this remorse, or fear of abandonment? And does it matter? It might.

12 or 20 questions: with Sarah de Leeuw

Sarah de Leeuw, a cultural-historical geographer and creative writer, is an assistant professor with the Northern Medical Program at UNBC, the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. Her work, both as a geographer in a faculty of medicine and as a creative writer, engages questions of power, place and landscape, social justice and marginalization. She is the author of Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (2004) and her most recent book, The Geographies of a Lover, is a collection of poetry forthcoming (2012) with NeWest Press. In 2009 she was awarded 1st Prize in the CBC Literary Awards for her creative non-fiction essay “Columbus Burning”. Her poetry has appeared in a number of Canadian literary journals, including Fiddlehead, Wascana, and The Claremont Review. Her academic writing, which is broadly concerned with (post)colonial geographies, Indigenous peoples, and the social determinants of health, appears in venues ranging from The Canadian Family Physician and Children’s Geographies, to The Journal of Native Education and The Canadian Geographer. In 2007/2008, prior to moving back to northern British Columbia, she was a Fulbright Fellow with the University of Arizona.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Before I published my first book, I didn’t think it was actually possible to publish a book. Although books surrounded me, and although I have loved books for as long as I can remember, I couldn’t quite grasp that it was possible that I might one day write, and publish, one. That I might one day see a book I wrote on a shelf in a bookstore. The idea of publishing my work was more an abstraction than a reality. So Unmarked made the idea of a book real. My most recent book, which is a collection of poetry as opposed to a work of creative non-fiction, is hard to compare with Unmarked. In the case of both books, though, geography remains the defining theme upon which all the text moves and turns.

2 - How did you come to creative non-fiction first, as opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?

Despite my upcoming book (The Geographies of a Lover) being a collection of poetry, creative non-fiction remains my favorite literary genre. As much as I am a skeptic about ideas of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ (and by this I mean that I deeply believe every known thing is filtered through our imaginations, our expectations, our circumstances), I find it easier, and more satisfying, to contemplate topics that I think have social import, or might contribute to a broad goal of expanding social justice, through a genre that is anchored in events or places that readers are unable to dismiss as ‘mere fiction.’

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I write all the time. I usually have half a dozen writing projects on the go at any time…and I consider everything a writing project, from writing emails to people I love through to writing grants for research about the colonial history of British Columbia. The initial ideas for many of these projects begin as I am walking, running, hiking or swimming. I find that if I can exhaust myself, if I can simply empty my brain of worries (and this often comes with physical exertion) then the ideas for writing projects will flood in quite quickly. I must admit that I am rarely without an idea about something to write. I do tend to work through a number of drafts (typically 3 to 5) before I feel as though a piece is approaching completion. Most of my work, after initial conceptualization, does start with notes scribbled in various notebooks.

4 - Where does a poem or piece of non-fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I tend to organize my writing projects around themes. Once I have a theme, I have a basic idea of where my writing will go. I rarely think about the final, final, outcome of my writing. I do not want to feel as though I am writing to an end. Things seem to end where and when they are supposed to end and I usually can’t envision that when I embark. So, for instance, Unmarked began with the desire to map in writing the places that I know as home. From there, it was just a matter of “filling in the map” as a wonderful BC geographer (Cole Harris) once wrote. After a certain amount of time, a certain number of essays, I realized I had completed about as much of the map as I could. And so I just wrapped it up and offered it out to the world. I was more humbled than anything else when my “map” appeared as the book Unmarked.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Very much a part of my creative process. I think public readings are essential and that it is an author’s responsibility to undertake them. It is a way of sharing, a way of telling the world that it’s ok to be a writer, to write about the world. I can’t say I love (or even really enjoy) doing them, but I think orating and sharing the written word, which is too often privately produced and privately consumed, makes it come alive. I think it is an author’s responsibility to make the written word sing, to make people want to connect with it. Readings keep us from being too obtuse, I think. And I think it makes writing accessible to audiences who, as an author, you might not otherwise be engaging.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

I do think that writing – and art and creative expressions more broadly – perform a kind of ‘social work.’ I want my writing to move people, to make them think about or (even better) to care about that which is in my estimation too often overlooked. All the ordinary ‘stuff’ that so often is passed over, so often dismissed as the detritus of the everyday. I think there persists terrible social injustices that are worthy of our attention and I try to turn my attention these in my writing.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I believe that the work produced by writers, and other artists, is culture. Of course there are others who form and produce ‘culture,’ but I think it is the job of writers and artists to produce representations that make the world discernible, legible. We/they produce the expressions and representations by which society understands itself, by which we understand each other and ourselves. And we should not be flippant about this.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Essential.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

With reference to writing, I think the best thing I ever heard was…in order to produced anything good at all, you first have to produce all sorts of shit. The production of everything that makes you cringe is essential to producing that one, single, small, solitary thing that you are sort-of-kind-of pleased with.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to creative non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?

I like to move between and amongst genres, although creative non-fiction and poetry (in addition to more academically focused writing) are the two I favour. I think there’s always an appeal to expressing and representing in various genres because some topics seem to lend themselves to one kind voice as opposed to another.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I don’t really have a routine per se. I just write. Whenever I have the time and space. I like to write earlier in the day as opposed to later. I am not a night owl and I tend to write in private as opposed to in cafes or bookstores (public spaces). I’m kind of a routinized person. I like to wake up early, sometimes go running, always have coffee, try sometimes to make lists of the things I am going to do, and then spend time checking things off my lists. I often include a note on my lists, every day, to write on whatever project I’m currently working on.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

I don’t ever really get stalled. Sometimes I lack the time to execute all my ideas, but the world is a never ending source of inspiration. No matter where I turn, there seems to me to be fodder for writing. Having said this, and despite my great love of spending time alone, I think I take great inspiration from the company of people. I do find laughing and talking and eating with wonderful people a constant source of inspiration. I have to say that environments with less (as opposed to more) human alteration are those to which I return – for solace, for motivation. So…if I had to choose a hike up to alpine versus an afternoon in a big-city coffee shop, I’d choose the former. But, having said that, I also turn and return to all the things that abound in cities: museums of contemporary art, great bookstores, the hustle and bustle of streets thronging with people, really great restaurants.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cottenwood sap. Rotting salmon on wet sand. Fall mushrooms in moss.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

In general, my measure of a ‘good’ or ‘successful’ creative expression (be that dance, a painting, a piece of pottery or even a fabulous meal) is something that, when I leave it, has made me see the world in a slightly different light. It is to these things I return for influence. Anything that makes me see things in a fresh way. I am always on the hunt for this, so I find it in many, many, different forms.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

I am a rather undiscerning reader. Put something in front of me and I’ll likely read it. Certainly there are things that I like more than others (I have a preference for paired down muscular language and an aversion to anything that focuses on romance in a fluffy confessional way) but I read widely because I want to explore all the beautiful genres and voices that are out there.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

To be honest, I haven’t really ever given it much thought. On the main, I’m doing what I want to be doing and I’m confident that things will present themselves and I will enjoy whatever comes my way.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I always thought if I didn’t write, or if I wasn’t employed in academia, I’d like to be a chef. I love to cook. And the people I love most in the world are those who like to cook and who like to be cooked for.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

I don’t suppose anything ‘made’ me write. It just always seemed like the thing to do. Of course the world is full of so many other things, but the neat thing about writing is that – for me at least – I get to do these things AND write about them.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?

I am a great fan of everything that Cormac MaCarthy writes and I have to say that The Road just tore me up. Really, really, good. For some reason Gaton Soussey’s Vaudeville has stuck with me and I just finished Joseph Boyden’s Three Day Road which I also thought was impressive. Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, who is one of my all time favorite authors, was terrific. Alice Oswald – a British poet – was recently recommended to me and her book Dart is just perfect. I have to confess that I haven’t seen many movies in the last year or so. I plan on rectifying this soon!

20 - What are you currently working on?

In addition to some papers and book chapters, the two big projects in the hoper right now are another collection of creative non-fiction essays about loss (I am already in dept to Sid Marty for his assistance with this evolving manuscript) and a collection of essays, which will be accompanied by photos, about people who provide various types of health care in northern B.C.

12 or 20 questions (second series);

Anik See, Saudade: The Possibilities of Place

I used to think that I could bear any kind of loss – a limb, sight, the love of my life – but memory. That kind of loss leaves you with nothing but starting over, which seems like an insult. I’m now at an age where I’m noticing that any memory is not what it used to be. You think memory is like anything else, that it gets better with practice, and it can, but it’s a bit strange. We tend to think of it as either a straight line or bubbles of past experience that touch nothing else unless something forces us to connect them. I think it’s more like that stone wall that the sculptor Andy Goldsworthy built, the one that starts at a four-lane highway and runs straight, straight, directly away from it, bolting across a huge empty field. It only begins to twist and turn, like a river, when it enters a forest, which is where it starts to form itself to the landscape, to the obstacles in its path. On the inside we shape our memory wherever it’ll fit. On the outside it’s the shortest line between two points. Maybe when I was younger I was on the outside. Maybe I’m on the inside now. Funny thing is, I’ve discovered that I don’t mind losing memory as much as I always thought I would. I think it’s hugely important, but it can also wind up being a bit masturbatory. Maybe it’s enough to remember why it’s important. Like landscape.

Once I picked up Anik See’s Saudade: The Possibilities of Place (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2008), it was impossible to put down. A travel book written as a series of essays, or a series of essays written as a travel book, See’s Saudade revels in a fantastic mixture of such thick physical description and meditative thought that it is impossible to see this book as a work on travel. Saudade is not as much about the place where the author is, and writing about, as being in that particular geography; less writing the place but how the author is shaped in, into and around that place, writing Sri Lanka, the American/Canadian border, and the roads of Tbilisi. In Saudade, See manages not only to write out the possibilities of place, but writes out a shape of being.

Reading this collection has echoes of Sarah de Leeuw's Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2004), or even a Peter Carey book I read years ago about his home city, writing himself back into his previous geography, moving into some of the best of what creative non-fiction is supposed to be about. Whatever else this book is, See writes her way through her own thinking about what geography means, and the differences between how people exist through circumstance, geography and other arbitrary enough markers, and seeing just how small some of those differences actually are. How does she achieve such remarkable clarity in such a small space?

What I’m aiming for in this crapshoot, or perhaps just what resonates with me, is essentially an idealization of places or events that have never been experienced. It’s the Portuguese notion of saudade that’s simmering: the feeling of yearning for something impossible to regain because it never quite existed. It’s not quite homesickness or pining for someone loved or once loved, but more a longing, the opposite of the Proustian sense of wistfulness. It’s mostly a pleasant feeling, but it can often be too located in the present and future to be practical.

the ghosts of geography: de Leeuw & Dragland & writing my eventual non-fictions

Since learning about my writer-in-residence position in Edmonton this fall [see my related piece in The Danforth Review], I've been thinking a lot about geography and non-fiction more specifically than I had before; it's always been in the back of my mind, wanting to eventually get a more traditional book on Glengarry County started down the road, after my book-length essay is finally finished, and perhaps my genealogy project recording all the McLennan / MacLennan lines throughout Stormont and Glengarry is finished [see my related note on such]. I've been working on that last one now for about fifteen years or so, and it's nowhere near finished, so god knows when it would come out, let alone allow me to go somewhere further with the same research; still, I know easily I'd know enough about county by then to pretty much be able to write anything. I've been thinking about that thing called literary non-fiction, a flow of literary prose that talks about every thread of what is happening from the inside to the outside in a way that brings the reader not only into that place and the mind of that place being talked about, but inside the mind of the author as well. Where do the lines exist? There is so much more I have to learn.

Still, books are made from books (as David McFadden keeps telling me), and I've been stockpiling for some time, waiting for the sparks of an accumulating idea to come to the point of being ready to begin. Lately I've been reading Sarah de Leeuw's Unmarked: Landscapes Along Highway 16 (Edmonton AB: NeWest Press, 2004). Written as a memoir working itself through geography, it follows the author along a path of growing up and grown in northern British Columbia and all the places that her family lived, using the thread of Highway 16 as the current that runs beneath the piece, writing from Juskatla, Queen Charlotte City, Prince Rupert, Cranberry Junction, Kitwanga, Prince George, Fraser Lake and Terrace.

Over the bridge, the waters of Kumbis Creek brown under the thickly creosoted deck. On the right hand side, a CN Rail worker from Quebec lived in a trailer court with four trailers. I knew because I babysat for his kids; someone in town heard I spoke a few words of French. On Friday nights, once a month, I put the two children of the displaced CN Rail worker to bed.

"Bon nuit," I would say. "Bon voyage."

I had forgotten how to say "sweet dreams" in French, and in the silence of a logging camp town I sent those children into the night journeying. The beginning of something, even if translated incorrectly, into a lapsed language.

As the back cover asks, "What falls in the space between the dots on a map?" This is country that exists for loggers, where so few others would ever need to go, and landscape shaped by the hand of those who work it as much as any place in the country. Somehow less a book about geography than working itself through the geography into the place where memoir sits, de Leeuw exists on that line between what kind of book she seems to be writing, where the landscape and its people are separate from her, but never apart from her own sense of self. At what point after physical escape from geography will she realize that escape is impossible, as the land and its people imprinted permanently on her body? As de Leeuw writes, "How far away is away? How far away is far? For that matter, how far is far enough?" This is a land where cultures not only clash, but they had long crashed headlong into each other, but the evidence still forefront. As she writes,

As I made my way over the suspension bridge into Gitwinksihlkw, I noticed for the first time the small white church about twenty-five metres down stream. once I had crossed the bridge, both feet now in Gitwinksihlkw and the snow-covered flatness of the lava across the river now, I picked my way along the icy path to the building. In the strange grey light that takes over the Nass Valley in the winter, the church seemed even more run down than it truly was. In fading red letters above the doorway, which was now boarded and sagging, was the emblem of the Salvation Army.

The windows of the church were smashed and gaping open, the entire structure leaning into the wind. It seemed like at any moment it would fall into the waters of the Nass River and be washed away forever. I bent down into the snow to look at the old building from the bottom. It was only from this angle I noticed the church's foundations.

At first, as breath steamed in front of my eyes, I thought I must be mistaken.

But as I bent lower, my hands freezing against the snow, eyes of bears and killer whales could still be made out. The huge logs making up the foundation were totem poles, hacked and sawed so the church could be built on top of them, slowly turning to earth in this tiny village on the edge of the lava.

When thinking of non-fiction prose and travel, when thinking of non-fiction prose and turning geography from that prose, turning the words over like soil; thinking the Alberta before me and the Glengarry that can never be completely behind. Thinking about the piece I've been working for months for a book I've been editing on Glengarry County for Chaudiere Books, out sometime next year, with pieces by Don McKay, Stephen Brockwell, Clare Latremouille, Bonnie Laing, Joan MacLeod, Patrick Leroux, Nicholas Lea and others, working that same bit of ground in their own ways. Thinking about the project turning slow in my head for my eventual west, how in so many ways I have never left home, and how to work that into prose, writing the story of my travel that ends up being, predominantly, my story of home.

It's a difficult thing to write about places you know so well they become ingrained, or so you think, but somehow everyone tries. The percentage of first novels as coming-of-age. Even through leaving, I kept ties, including Gary Geddes and Henry Beissel, poets and Concordia University creative writing professors who had made homes in the area. (Both have since retired, with Geddes on the left coast, living on Vancouver Island for the last decade, and Beissel moving in 2005 to an Ottawa suburb.) Both from places of their own to appear in mine, appearing in the 1960s. Gary from the west, the prairies of the 1940s and 50s, and Henry a young teen in Germany during the Second World War. If you can imagine, Henry Beissel from 1950s Toronto deciding to travel in a car with a friend three months from coast to coast before he took Canadian citizenship, just to understand the context of what he was entering into. Why doesn't every Canadian-born do such a thing? It should be mandatory.

When they put out (what I called) their Glengarry poetry collections, dealing with the spaces around them, Beissel’s Stones to Harvest (1993) and Geddes’ Girl by the
Water (1994), influenced by the green landscape, I had mixed reactions. Gary Geddes’ as a section, from a poet who could, for a while, write politics better than most (as he was one of the few poets in Canada at the time seeming to try), and Beissel, as a whole, attempting, perhaps, to situate himself; each finding their own particular place in the wood. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in admitting a certain jealousy, a feeling of lines being crossed. I liked the books when I read them, and the rush of seeing in other people’s words the things you know, but neither of them were the ways I saw them, the difference between observation and those things that are built in at birth. I saw them as markers, strengthening my resolve to build my own collection, to reacquaint and ever re-appropriate my own history from the mouths of others.

When thinking of non-fiction, thinking the succulent prose of Stan Dragland, originally from Alberta but decades in London, Ontario before retiring from teaching, and heading about as far east as he could, ending up in St. John's, Newfoundland. While thinking about all of this, I've been going through his collection Journeys Through Bookland (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1984); I've been going through his Apocrypha: Further Journeys (Edmonton AB: NeWest/writer as critic: IX,2003),

The word "bridge," in the name of the Alberta city on the banks of the Belly River that was named for William Lethbridge, no longer signifies.

But there is one helluva bridge in that city. Here is a postcard of it. On the reverse, under the space for a message, is the caption: "The longest, highest railroad bridge of its kind in the world. Constructed in 1909 in Lethbridge, Alberta." I bought the postcard to take into my classes whenever I taught Thomas King's Medicine River. Harlan Bigbear tricks his brother Joe into jumping off that bridge, and young Lum is a suicide off that bridge, or one like it, in King's Truth & Bright Water. The same bridge is the key to my past, and a clue to my moving now.

My father had a small stock of family stories, like the one about my jumping into the Banff Hotsprings pool at the age of six. I had never been near a pool but swimming looked simple from the observation deck above, so I hustled into my trunks and raced from the change room to the pool and jumped in at the five-foot level. The
second time I surfaced, someone noticed and pulled me out by the hair. The punch line my father savoured was the line I met him with as he emerged poolside: Dad!—he always caught the amazement in my tone—I can't swim at all!

And my father used to tell about hopping a freight in the dirty thirties on the Lethbridge side of the world's longest and highest bridge and hanging in numb terror out over the valley until the train made the fair side and he tumbled off, never to ride the rails again. So I was conceived out west, in Alberta. I was not and never will be born in Ontario, where I lived the second half of my life to date, where my children were born. Two thousand miles away from Alberta and that bridge back in Lethbridge, an okay place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. Don’t have to; I brought Alberta with me when I moved east. And sometimes, during one of those long, lovely Ontario evenings, if I'm not careful, having had one too many Scotches, I feel Alberta begin to throb inside me and I hear some ambient western movie soundtrack stir, and start to swell and, and (wouldn’t you know it) there's my dad's beautiful tenor in unison with the Yodelling Cowboy, Wilf Carter:

In the Blue Canadian Rockies
Spring is sighing through the trees…