Writing by Ken Wilson, author of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road
Fairy Hill was lovely this afternoon: not many ticks (I only found two when I got back to the car) and a host of crocuses. I saw some three-flowered avens, and heard (but didn’t see) a western meadowlark. I met a friendly dog, and a friendly dog owner, too.
It’s very dry, though, despite all the snow we had this winter. We need rain.
Last year, I shared a terrible essay with my writer’s group. One of my colleagues asked, “what is this really about?” (Excellent question, Roberta!) I thought about that for quite a while. Community, I decided–or, to be more specific, my desire for community. I wasn’t sure how to proceed with that essay, and so I let it sit while I wrote and revised other things. But now, looking at the list of things left to write for my second book (the manuscript is due in June–wish me luck!), I can see that it’s time to start working through the scattered research materials I’ve been collecting. I decided to start with Casey Plett’s wonderful little book, On Community, partly because another colleague, Tanis MacDonald, posted about it on Instagram. I could not have chosen a better jumping-off point.
On Community is one of Biblioasis’s Field Notes series–short books, or long essays, the titles of which all begin with the word “On”: On Class, On Writing and Failure, or the forthcoming On Oil. So far, I’ve read two in that series; both were excellent. A new item has been added to my bucket list: write a book for that series. I doubt that’s going to happen, but you never know. As the Victorian poet Robert Browning wrote in one of his dramatic monologues, “Andrea del Sarto,” “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, / Or what’s a heaven for?”
So, what makes On Community so good? The breadth of research, for one thing. Plett includes people I’d heard of, like Robert Waldinger, but she also brings in others I knew nothing about, or who I didn’t know had written about community. But also I appreciated Plett’s acknowledgement of the complexity of community–the way it includes and excludes, the way it is “equally capable of cruelty and health in the way of many ordinary things, mundane actions that happen every day with the capacity for both salve and sickness,” to quote her thoughtful words. “Humans need community, but there’s no good assuming it’s always a conduit for goodness.” As Plato says, and Derrida through Plato, it’s a pharmakon, both cure and poison. As a trans woman, Plett has experienced a lot of exclusion and rejection from communities, as well as inclusion and acceptance, and she is aware of how complex and fraught and necessary community is. The alternative, bleak and lonely isolation, is unthinkable, even if that’s what many of us experience now, given the epidemic of loneliness in our culture.
I loved Plett’s notion that community is a verb, too, and her argument that we are entitled to be wary around strangers even as we need to be open to them as well. And I loved the call she makes to her readers at her essay’s conclusion–that we should try to do the unthinkable, which includes working towards becoming part of something larger than ourselves.
I’m happy I read this, and if I can make that terrible essay into something worth reading, and if it ends up getting included in my book, and if you happen to read it, you’ll see the influence Plett’s On Community has exerted on my thinking.
(This review is a haibun of sorts, because it’s National Poetry Writing Month.)
I was exhausted last night, but because it was the first day of National Poetry Writing Month, I thought I might celebrate by reading a couple of poems. After all, my friend Kim Fahner seems to be celebrating by reading a book of poetry every day this month, and while I doubt I’m capable of that feat, I ought to be able to read at least one poem, right? So I picked up Tim Bowling’s recent book, In the Capital City of Autumn, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. I know Bowling’s work a little–I reviewed his 2022 book of essays, The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, and I have one of his poems, “Teaching First-Year University,” taped to my office door–and I was curious to see what this book has to offer.
Even though I only intended to read a couple of poems before turning off the light and falling asleep, I couldn’t put this book down–and not just because the jacket copy quotes my review of The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, either. It’s just really good. The book consists of five sections of varying lengths. In three of those, Bowling reflects on his life and family history; in another, he imagines the thoughts of minor characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby; and, in the last, he mourns the death of his dog. It helps to know a little about his life, as I do from reading The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird–the fact that Bowling grew up near the Fraser River in a rural community that has since been swallowed up by Vancouver, that his father fished for salmon, that sometimes his father bartered salmon for vegetables with local farmers–but that knowledge isn’t absolutely necessary. In ways, though, In the Capital City of Autumn and The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird are companions, written at more or less the same time, reflecting on some of the same experiences.
I particularly loved the poems about The Great Gatsby, a book I’ve thought about since I read it in Grade 13, particularly its last sentence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” So lovely, that sentence, and so pessimistic: it suited my youthful melancholia, but these days, while I acknowledge the force the past exerts on us as individuals and as a collective, I want to think about the ways we can, if not escape the past, move away from it. There must be a word for poems that reflect on a text the way Bowling does here, something akin to the term “ekphrasis.” Maybe one of my readers, someone more intelligent or knowledgeable than me, will fill me in. In particular, I loved “The Butler with the Thumb, Ten Years Later,” which imagines Gatsby’s butler, whose primary function in the household (as I recall) was to operate an electric machine that, with a press of his thumb, turned oranges into orange juice. Ten years after Gatsby’s (spoiler alert!) death, that butler, now unemployed after the economic collapse of the Great Depression, remembers that summer of parties and carelessness:
How like the dim headlight
of a death car
the moon is
swerving across the lane,
how like a worn thumb
pressing with monotonous purpose
to extract the bitter juice of the world.
I like the link between (another spoiler!) the death of Myrtle Wilson, Gatsby’s lover, who is run over by Daisy Buchanan, a hit-and-run for which Gatsby takes the responsibility, and the butler’s juice-making, and the moon above Long Island that’s asserted here, and I understand why the butler would see the world’s juice as “bitter,” given his experience that summer and afterwards. At the same time, though, I wonder why that’s the adjective employed in the poem’s final lines. The orange juice the butler made would’ve been sweet; otherwise, nobody would’ve wanted it, and he would’ve been given some other task. I guess I want the world to be sweet, at least sometimes. I don’t want The Great Gatsby‘s sadness to be so dominant. In the Capital City of Autumn is lovely, and while I understand its tendency towards a minor key, all too well, that’s not the only thing we might write about.
Still, this is a strong collection, full of beautiful lines and images, and I’m glad I read it. As I did, I came up with this rough haiku, which is, yes, melancholy, despite my desire not to dwell in sadness:
How I wish I too could make
such lovely things with words–
not yet, perhaps, but maybe someday.
There–a poem for NaPoWriMo, which makes this post into a haibun. Maybe not a very good one, but that’s okay. Maybe I’ll reread The Great Gatsby as part of this blogging project. I think the copy I bought in 1982 (we had to purchase our own textbooks in Grade 13, you know) is on my bookshelves somewhere. If I do, you’ll be the first to know, and I’ll be sure to give Tim Bowling the credit for inspiring me.