LONELIEST GIRL YOU’LL NEVER MEET

So much of who I have become as a person and as a writer stems from a connection to community in Winnipeg. I was a lonely child and I have carried that adjective into adulthood. I mention this only briefly because the intention is not to elicit a boo hoo response, to establish any sort of poor me trajectory. I only mean to say that I am aware I feel more alone than I actually am. If I were to pause and reflect, catch my reflection in my sideview mirror, I would see that objects are closer than they appear.

In 2018, I drove to Montreal from Winnipeg to pursue my MA in English. What I was really trying to pursue was a different version of myself. A poem I wrote opens with the line “Like any girl in her mid-twenties, I think Montreal might save me.” I can’t quite remember what I was running away from now, only that I carried my shadow with me, and brought all my baggage in the backseat. For the two years I lived in Montreal, I wrote very little. Whatever muscle I had for poetry became out of shape -- my metaphors couldn’t catch their breath, my lines broke before they could even begin. Writing became a chore and I became lazy, opting to sweep everything under the rug and watch TV every night. I left Winnipeg to find myself and lost myself instead. Winnipeg was the city I knew, the city that remembered me even when I forgot what I was trying to do.

I started writing poetry in 2012. I worked at Value Village and spent a good majority of each shift shopping for things to buy on my lunch breaks. I frequently “organized” the books and spent hours running a damp cloth along the bookshelves, reading titles as I went. This is how I discovered Charles Bukowski, and I must admit, this was my introduction to poetry. I didn’t own a laptop at the time, but I bought a typewriter off Kijiji and started writing poems. It was around this time I also discovered the work of Winnipeg writer Chandra Mayor, whose collection August Witch was an early influence on my writing. I also discovered literary journals. The pages of which collect so many voices, an assortment of new writers to fall in love with. My favourite journal was CV2, which at the time, I didn’t even know was local. You can imagine my excitement when I found out it was.

I lived in a room on the top floor of an 8-bedroom house that summer, the rooms of which had been sublet so many times that nobody knew who was actually supposed to be living there. That was my peak romanticize your life era -- I would stay up all night writing poetry, high or heavily-caffeinated, a cigarette hanging from my lip. My poetry was terrible, but my friends loved it, and that was enough to encourage me to take some creative writing courses at the U of W.

When I started writing, I was supported by and connected with many amazing programs in the city, like the Carol Shields Writer-in-Residence Program at the University of Winnipeg, the Writer-in-Residence Program at the Winnipeg Public Library, Speaking Crow, the Sheldon Oberman Mentorship program, and Open Mic Nights hosted by Juice, the U of W Creative Writing Journal. I also began volunteering at CV2, the journal I so greatly admired. I can document my growth as a person and writer alongside my trajectory at CV2. From volunteer to submission assistant to managing editor to the position I hold now -- poetry editor. Quite literally, a literary dream come true.

I smile when I think about what I once thought the office of a literary journal would be like. I imagined a large office in a heritage building, crown moldings and quarter-sawn oak cabinets. I imagined an editor-in-chief sitting in a private room with a glass door, feet up on the desk, with some sort of rotary phone beside them to call bewildered young poets (such as myself) to tell them their work had been accepted.

The CV2 office was in a heritage building, but it was a mess, paper everywhere, sweltering hot in the summer. All of the desks had seen the dawn of different eras and were mismatched and cramped in little corners. The editor-in-chief at the time was Clarise Foster, who is hands-down one of the most inspiring and encouraging people I know. Clarise is a person who uplifts others, who sees drive in emerging poets and steers them in the right direction. I worked with Clarise for many years, and today, she is a close friend. I try and carry her attitude, and through this, I know that uplifting and supporting the work of new and emerging writers is one of the most fulfilling things I can do.

Through creative writing classes at the U of W, I made a group of friends and it was them, also, who pushed me to further my writing. We became extremely close over one summer, had a group chat, spent almost every day together. We were a group brought together by writing, but just became writers who were good friends. They are all brilliant, and several left Winnipeg to pursue masters’ degrees. It was this that pushed me to do the same, when I had never intended to get a bachelor’s degree. That is what a community of writers does. You see potential in each other and it reflects back.

I am obviously a reflection of my surroundings. At the U of W, I was lucky to study writers like David Arnason and Robert Kroetsch. Great prairie writers who wrote through this landscape, flatlining like a heartbeat. Kroetch’s Seed Catalogue borderlines cult classic, but it is Arnason’s Marsh Burning that first influenced and continues to influence my writing. It is one of those collections I keep close, reread when I need inspiration. It is also this collection that I first openly imitated, writing a poem after it, and writing a poem that incorporates its lines in conversation with my own voice. The long poem is an ode to the prairies, and through writers like Kroetsch and Arnason, belongs to the prairies. The prairie long poem is a very specific form. I have always been drawn to it -- the feeling of the most free yet impossible task. Like all the nothingness that is in fact potential can drive you mad. In a long poem, you can do anything. So what the fuck are you going to do?

I started writing Xanax Cowboy, a long poem which became my debut collection of poetry. I was in Montreal, but I suppose the long poem was the prairie calling, leaving cryptic voicemails. I started working in a prairie format. I was calling Winnipeg collect. It was when I started writing a long poem that I really started writing again. It was a challenge. And no doubt, I wouldn’t have had the same sweeping interest if I lived somewhere else. My writing and my self would have found a different challenge to cling to.

I have been feeling stagnant lately, both in writing and in myself. I feel as if I am no longer becoming and I have become. I’m not a songbird but a sungbird. When I moved home in 2020, we were moving into pandemic times. I didn’t feel them much. I had someone ask me how the pandemic had impacted my practice and I honestly answered that it hadn’t. But I can see now how the move to Montreal did. I lost ties with what held me together, with the community I was close to. I used to think a community of writers in Winnipeg was something I would one day be a part of, some elite group. But of course I know now that community is loving and welcoming, is created everyday. If I take the time to look around, it is closer than the tricks of my mind may make it appear. It doesn’t feel so bad to feel like a sungbird when I can help others learn to sing.