BWS 14.03.18: Crystal Mars

Crystal Mars is an artist based in Toronto. She holds a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design and has exhibited in Canada and the United States. Her work explores desire, trauma, transformation, power, and memory through visual arts and literature. Read more here.

In her tanka poem below, Crystal reflects on how nothing is what it seems.

Deceit

 

Oceans become clouds;

butterflies were once larvae—

a double-edged sword

cutting hearts in half, until

bees run out of sweet nectar.

 

Crystal Mars visits Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, March 14, 2018 in our new home, Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church Street, Toronto, at 6:30pm (PWYC) alongside Sonia Di Placido, Alicia Elliott, Anar Ali, and special guest speaker Farzana Doctor who will discuss, “How to Mindfully Address Your Inner Critic (so that you can get back to your writing)”.

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BWS 14.03.18: Alicia Elliott

Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario with her husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Walrus, Macleans, Globe and Mail and many others. Her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards and has been selected to be published in Best Canadian Essays 2017. She has most recently been named the 2017-2018 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC. Her book of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in Spring 2019.

 

In her essay, On Seeing and Being Seen: The Difference Between Writing With Empathy and Writing With Love, Alicia expresses the importance of representing marginalized people in literature and discusses the difference between loving representation and “empathetic” representation. It will be included in her upcoming essay collection, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground.

I’ve heard that when you see someone you love your pupils get bigger, as if your eyes themselves want to swallow them up and trap them inside. I don’t know if that same physiology applies to seeing objects, but I like to imagine my pupils were huge, hungry black orbs when I first read Leanne Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love, gobbling up each of her words as fast as they could. Every sentence felt like a fingertip strumming a neglected chord in my life, creating the most gorgeous music I’d ever heard.

 

It was the first time I, as an Indigenous woman, read the work of another Indigenous woman. It was such an intimate and personally revelatory moment—as if she had reached out from the pages, lifted my face and smiled. She can see me, I thought. She can see me. I was twenty-five years old.

I’d known I wanted to write since I was twelve, but back then I’d never seen a girl like myself in the books I loved so much. I saw white girls—often upper-middle class, often pining after unremarkable white boys. So that’s what I wrote. I wrote my way out of used clothes and Hamburger Helper and parents who screamed in the night. None of my characters ever worried about money. None of them were concerned what their friends would think if they met their Haudenosaunee dad or their white bipolar mother. None of them had a Haudenosaunee dad or white bipolar mother. Things were simple; things were normal. Rich boys and brand names were normal.

Obviously, as I got older, my taste in literature changed. What didn’t change was my suspicion that publishers felt Indigenous girls like me were unworthy of book covers or book deals. Even in university the women we studied were white: Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Jane Austen. I admired these women’s work, but they weren’t writing what I needed to read, and this made it hard to believe there was space for what I needed to write.

So imagine my surprise when a fellow writer—a white woman—told me during post-workshop beers that I was going to get published right away “because I was Native.” I knew that there was some talk about the literary community’s need to be more “diverse,” but as far as I knew that was all it was. Talk. I could count the Native writers I knew of with half a hand—none of whom were women, and none of whom were writing about Native women in a way I recognized.

The idea that the colonialism, racism, and sexism—which had systematically kept Indigenous women out of the literary community—could somehow be leveraged through some half-assed literary affirmative action to benefit me as an Indigenous woman was absurd. And yet this white woman believed it with her whole heart. And yet this white woman got into an MFA program and I got rejected from every one I applied to. Perhaps I hadn’t made it clear enough on the application that I was Native. Perhaps I had made it too clear on the application I was Native. It was hard to say.

After that I stopped writing for years. When I would write—between mothering a four-year-old and shifts at my minimum wage job—I scraped all indigeneity out of my work. At least if my fiction read as “white” I’d be sure that any rejections were based on the work itself. I wouldn’t have to field questions about why my characters were Native, or deal with criticisms that they somehow weren’t “Indian enough”—issues that, as far as I could tell, never came up for white writers, for white work.

Then came Islands of Decolonial Love. Everything changed.

Click here to continue reading.

 

Alicia Elliott visits Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, March 14, 2018 in our new home, Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church Street, Toronto, at 6:30pm (PWYC) alongside Sonia Di Placido, Crystal Mars, and Anar Ali.

BWS 14.03.18: Sonia Di Placido

Sonia Di Placido is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, The Writer’s Union of Canada, The Canadian Women in The Literary Arts and The Association of Italian-Canadian Writers. An Associate Editor of Juniper Poetry Magazine, she has poems published by Carousel, Puritan, The White Wall Review, Jacket2, Canthius, The California Journal of Women Writers, and Juniper. In September 2016, she was part of the China Writers Association International Writer’s Residency for the cities of Tianjin, Binhai, and Beijing. Sonia teaches English as a Second Language with LINC Ontario part-time. Her first book Exaltation in Cadmium Red was published by Guernica Editions in 2012.

This fall Sonia will launch her second full-length book of poetry, FLESH. Below she shares two poems from her upcoming release. Visit Sonia’s blog for more information.

Camaraderie

The quiet Fleur-de-lys

sprout a warning

of the sovereign knot—

My knotted Francophone friend,

bearing her necklace, its charm

this 400^th weekend, 24^th of June.

 

Marie de Medici isn’t eager

to cross these icy skins, our lapping

ocean and rivers that hide

 

poison ivy in spring

(among fern ghettos)

over granite

over ore.

 

Shield shelved into rock,

this greener ground

(jewels of silver

amber              quartz)

cast under Champlain’s shores—

Temiskaming and Ville Marie.

 

Our kindred bovinae spirits—

Wilder-ness-Miss Buffalo       exiled.

Reproducing nil, we wile

trampling trilliums.

Frayed grass flowers align

between province and providence.

 

In blood, we draw iron from these plants

that seep it out of soil—we are

diagnosed with mineral deficiency.

Our “teeth and bones, once coral”

now white, the ovaries turned to fluorite.

 

Luna Bound

This wit-warm womb peeks out, first

to grow tentacles from a dark vessel

evading space debris

 

I come, Luna bound, brave,

my bounce a touch of dust

in dirt-dry elements—

 

they blow upward at non-gravity,

wound with empty craters.

Hellas basin is the first to hear

 

my delayed arrival in waves

to you, moon, a wound

wound in your own evening.

Sunlight and dark of earth-day—

 

you, moon, my rounder egg,

we are a non-encounter.

 

Sonia Di Placido visits Brockton Writers Series on Wednesday, March 14, 2018 in our new home, Glad Day Bookshop, 499 Church Street, Toronto, at 6:30pm (PWYC) alongside Alicia Elliott, Crystal Mars, and Anar Ali. Our special guest speaker will be announced soon!

Brockton Writers Series 14.03.18

Wednesday, March 14, 2018 – 6:30pm

Brockton Writers Series presents readings by

Sonia Di Placido
Alicia Elliott
Crystal Mars
Anar Ali

with special guest speaker

Farzana Doctor

—

Glad Day Bookshop

499 Church Street, Toronto

The reading is PWYC (suggested $3-$5) and features a Q&A with the writers afterward. Books and refreshments are available for sale.

ACCESSIBILITY INFO
The venue is accessible. Please refrain from wearing scents.

Many thanks to the Ontario Arts Council for their support.

And to the Canada Council for the Arts for travel funding!

 —

GUEST SPEAKER

How to Mindfully Address Your Inner Critic (so that you can get back to your writing).

Farzana Doctor is the award-winning author of three novels: Stealing Nasreen, Six Metres of Pavement and All Inclusive. She has just finished a fourth called Four Wives. Her claim to fame was that she was Voted Best Author in NOW Magazine’s 2015 Best of Toronto Readers’ Choice Poll, beating Margaret Atwood. She co-founded the Brockton Writers Series and has been its curator and co-host for the last eight years. Click here to learn more.

 —

READERS

 

Sonia Di Placido is currently completing an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC. She is a member of The League of Canadian Poets, The Writer’s Union of Canada, The Canadian Women in The Literary Arts and The Association of Italian-Canadian Writers. An Associate Editor of Juniper Poetry Magazine, she has poems published by Carousel, Puritan, The White Wall Review, Jacket2, Canthius, The California Journal of Women Writers, and Juniper. In September 2016, she was part of the China Writers Association International Writer’s Residency for the cities of Tianjin, Binhai, and Beijing. Sonia teaches English as a Second Language with LINC Ontario part-time. Her first book Exaltation in Cadmium Red was published by Guernica Editions in 2012. FLESH is her second full-length book of poetry.

 

Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer living in Brantford, Ontario with her husband and child. Her writing has been published by The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Walrus, Macleans, Globe and Mail and many others. Her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards and has been selected to be published in Best Canadian Essays 2017. She has most recently been named the 2017-2018 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC. Her book of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in Spring 2019.

 

 

Crystal Mars is an artist based in Toronto. She holds a BFA from the Ontario College of Art & Design and has exhibited in Canada and the United States. Her work explores desire, trauma, transformation, power, and memory through visual arts and literature. Read more here.

 

 

 

 

Anar Ali’s first book, Baby Khaki’s Wings, a collection of short stories, was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (Best First Book), Ontario’s Trillium Book Award, and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Her debut novel, The Night of Power, is forthcoming from Penguin. Ali is a recent graduate of the Canadian Film Centre and has a 1-hour TV family drama series in development with the CBC. She currently splits her time between Toronto and Mexico.