Tag: Louise B. Halfe-Skydancer

26. Louise Bernice Halfe—Sky Dancer, wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration

Louise Halfe is an important poet; the former Saskatchewan poet laureate and parliamentary poet laureate’s work reveals the truth of residential schools and colonialism more generally, and the difficult work of recovery and restoring balance to individuals and communities, in ways that would cause the scales to drop from the eyes of the most entrenched denialist. And wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration, her new collection of short essays and poems, is also (not surprisingly) essential.

The subtitle, especially the word “inspiration,” is the key. Inspiration is related to respiration, and for Halfe, inspiration flows like breath, in and out, a cyclical rhythm that’s linked to other cycles (the round of the seasons, for instance) and the wind. The book’s first poem refers to the wind’s “plaintive breath,” and the last one concludes, “I will be one / with their breath.” Those lines are about “the Night Sky Dancers,” the “Great Mystery” that nourishes Halfe constantly.

So much has happened to interfere with those relationships, to block both breath and inspiration: residential schools, lateral violence, colonialism, cultural genocide. wîhtamawik traces possibilities of recovery from those ongoing harms, through language and ceremony and creative expression. It presents us with layered connections, between the cycles of our bodies and our lives, and the greater cycles of the world that sustain us. It shares ethical truths from Plains Cree or nêhiyaw culture, ideals we would all do well to try to follow. It emphasizes a holistic approach to life, one that brings together our minds, bodies, spirits, and the earth. There’s a lot to think about here, and that thinking can only open up new possibilities, perhaps ones that lead towards the decolonization Halfe urges.

I will be in conversation with Halfe and poet and scholar Jesse Archibald-Barber at Artesian in Regina on the evening of Tuesday, May 19, as part of the Cathedral Village Arts Festival. It promises to be a productive discussion; if you’re in or close to Regina, please join us.

15. Laurie D. Graham, Calling It Back to Me

Almost everything I’ve read and posted about in the past month has been connected to work. This book, Laurie D. Graham’s Calling It Back to Me, wasn’t–at least, not directly. I’m a fan of Graham’s poetry, and when I heard back in January that Calling It Back to Me was going to be published, I preordered a copy. It arrived on Friday. Yesterday I found myself eating dinner in a restaurant by myself, and luckily, Calling It Back to Me was in my backpack. I read it quickly, unable to put it down. It’s just excellent.

Calling It Back to Me begins with two epigraphs. One is from the Irish writer Eavan Boland (who is a recurring presence in Louise Halfe-Skydancer’s new book wîhtamawik/Tell Them: On a Life of Inspiration): “A hundred years ago she was a child. But where? Strange to think that once the circumstances of her life were simple and available. They have become, with time, fragments and guesswork.” The second is from The Larger Conversation: Contemplation and Place by Tim Lilburn, a book that’s been waiting on my bookshelf for my attention for quite some time: “All thinking is a kind of autobiography, and autobiography always encompasses more than a single life.” Both fit Calling It Back to Me perfectly, since it’s about Graham’s grandmothers and great-grandmothers, the fragments of their lives she’s been able to piece together, to guess at, and the lives around their lives, their families and communities.

The book is divided into four sections, and I’m not sure if they’re four long poems (possible) or four collections of untitled poems (also possible). In syntax, line, and layout, they emphasize the fragmentary nature of what Graham has been able to piece together about her forebears. The first section, “Calling It Back to Me,” focuses on the objects those women left behind: photographs, a few documents, “a darning mushroom / a tin of teaspoons.” Those objects might be “heirlooms” that belong to Graham’s mother or grandmother, who is the subject of the final section, “A Good Closing,” where she is being moved from her home into assisted living or long-term care with Graham’s assistance. The other two sections, nestled within that frame, turn to other ancestors: “The Great-Grandmothers” presents fragmentary biographies of those four women, all of whom settled in Saskatchewan and Alberta after emigrating from Europe; and “Toward an Origin Story” provides a slightly broader consideration of the causes and effects of the arrival of Graham’s forebears (and other settlers) here. I had been at a meeting that afternoon of people working to encourage the preservation of grassland ecology in Saskatchewan before I sat down to read Calling It Back to Me, and “Toward an Origin Story” reflected the concerns I heard expressed there:

they sailed off
to become the boot

of the plains, stamping
out the grasses and trees–

investment companies
bulldozing the windbreaks,

filling in the sloughs, flattening
hills and houses, seeding the ditches,

every arable, pilfered inch–

the settlement story going sour
in the heat and the haze.

The ecological damage of that process is paired with the human costs (addiction, injury, child mortality, exile), which shifts to Graham’s experiences of funerals, of trying to pull together fragments of information to tell her ancestors stories, a history which stubbornly remains a collection of shards. The lines here tend to be short, encouraging a slow, even elegaic reading cadence, and the poems are in couplets and single lines, sometimes spread across the page or spaced out almost as if they were in columns and could be read horizontally or vertically, all of which reinforces the way that stories, especially the stories of women, don’t survive intact.

I read Calling It Back to Me without stopping, almost without taking a breath. I want to read it again: more slowly this time, I think, so that I can savour it.

My copies of Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place From the Side of the Road have arrived!

I posted on social media last week about this milestone in my writing career, but one photograph and a couple of lines of text didn’t manage to convey my excitement about getting my copies of my forthcoming book, Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road.

When I got home from work last Wednesday, I immediately saw the box on the kitchen table. The contents were obvious even without looking at my publisher’s return address on the shipping label: copies of my book. Ten of them, to be specific–tangible evidence of years of writing and editing. And, of course, walking.

It took an hour or so before I summoned the courage to open the box. This is my first book. I never expected to write, never mind publish, one. Ten years ago, I played a dull-witted university dean in Brian Stockton’s feature-length comedy, The Sabbatical. My character, Dean Vernon, tells the film’s protagonist, James Pittman, a burned-out photography professor who’s afraid he’ll perish if he doesn’t publish, that publishing a book is a big deal, because it means someone thinks so highly of your work that they’re willing to kill trees for it. And here, in this box, is evidence that someone was willing to do that for mine. Walking the Bypass, as my character tells James, has weight and heft. It’s unique and ambitious, too. I hope it finds an audience and has a long life. I’ll do everything I can to help, but as my writer friend Kim Fahner tells me, it’ll find its own way. I trust her, because she knows about writing and publishing: she’s published several books of poetry and a novel, and she’s working on a creative-nonfiction manuscript. Her new book of poems, The Pollination Field, arrived two weeks ago, and now that the summer course I’ve been teaching is finished, I’m looking forward to reading it.

The striking cover design is by Duncan Campbell, one of the last ones he did before he retired from University of Regina Press. I took the photograph: it’s what you see if you’re walking north on the Regina Bypass as it approaches the Highway 1/Ring Road interchange. What the photograph doesn’t convey is the sound of pigeons roosting beneath the overpasses and the loud, hollow banging of trucks hitting the expansion joints of the highway above. For those kinds of details, you’ll need to read the book.

Alex McPhee drew the map that graces the first pages of Walking the Bypass. When my copy of his full-colour map of Saskatchewan arrived, I knew that if I ever needed a map for a publication, I would ask him. His work is beautiful. If you’re not from Regina, and you need a visual guide to where I’m taking you, Alex’s map will help. There are photographs inside the book as well. One of my goals in writing this book was to give its readers a vivid sense of what it’s like to circumnavigate Regina by walking on the shoulder of the new highway that goes around it. I sometimes joke that I walked the Bypass so that you don’t have to–although after you read Walking the Bypass, you might be inspired to follow my example. Like other journeys I’ve made on foot, the one I write about in this book was transformative. It changed the way I think about this place.

Two writers I admire immensely wrote blurbs for the cover. Candace Savage calls Walking the Bypass “original, unsettling, and provocative,” and Louise B. Halfe-Skydancer says that the book “reminds settlers of the need to remember intergenerational responsibility, atonement, and decolonization–words that might describe a path forward.” To have writers of their calibre say such things about something I’ve written–well, it’s overwhelming.

Walking the Bypass: Notes On Place From the Side of the Road will be officially released on October 14. There will be launches in Regina and possibly elsewhere, and I’m looking forward to reading from it in Ontario later this fall. In the meantime, you can preorder it from University of Regina Press, from online retailers, or from your favourite independent bookseller.