Clara Sherley-Appel (CSA): This is Story Behind the Story. I’m your host, Clara Sherley-Appel, and my guest today is poet, organizer, and performer Jillian Christmas. She has won numerous Grand Slam Championship titles, and in 2016, she was named one of two Poets of Honour by the Canadian Festival of the Spoken Word. Her work has been featured in a variety of online publications, including Lemon Hound, The Rusty Tuque, and the Huffington Post, and in several collections, including Matrix New Queer Writing, The Post Feminist Post, Plenitude Magazine, Room Magazine, and in the celebrated anthology, The Great Black North: Contemporary African Canadian Poetry. She is also an “enthusiastic organizer” who has participated in, developed, and executed programs in partnership with Toronto Poetry Project, WordPlay--Poetry in Schools, the Vancouver Writers Festival, the Talking Stick Festival, and many other organizations. Her new poetry collection, The Gospel of Breaking, came out in early March, and it is the focus of our conversation today. Jillian Christmas, welcome to Story Behind the Story. Jillian Christmas (JC): Thank you so much for having me here. (CSA): As I was researching you for this interview, I noticed that almost everywhere, you are described as both a poet and an organizer, with a focus on “increasing anti-oppression initiatives in the spoken word.” Tell me about that work; Is there a relationship between your work as an organizer and your work as a poet? (JC): Yah there definitely is a relationship between the two. I think that my work as an organizer was birthed from my desire to be a poet who performs. When I first started in performance I was still living in Toronto at the time; I'm now on unseated Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Squamish territories out in Vancouver. Toronto is a big pool (she giggles) and I was a little fish, and I wanted to perform but it was a matter of creating spaces for that to happen. And so I started doing that. I started creating spaces that I wanted to be in. I started with a show at Vapor Lounge, actually, at Yonge and Bloor, and it was a little poetry show that ran for about two year. It was wonderful, and it was my first dip of my toes into starting to organize, and I was kind of hooked at that point. When I flew out to Vancouver to continue on my work out here, my focus shifted a little bit from just recreational gatherings to spaces that could also hold container for more anti-opressive work happening in community, and my work with Verses Festival of Words and Reframing Relations (which sends poets into schools to talk about decolonization) and these pieces all started to cobble together to form a pretty vast organizational network in miles. (CSA): The poems in The Gospel of Breaking explore a pretty wide variety of themes and play with a lot of different forms. What binds them together, to you? What’s the common thread? (JC): I think that a lot of them are meditations on longing and love of a vast variety. I think I tried to explore love in as many different ways as I possibly could and with as honest a lens as I could, so that speaks to my exploration of myself and my experiences and also the relationships that exist in the book. I think that the book is meant to reveal these connections and the power that they hold, and the lessons that come from the loss of connection, and how that propels me forward into the desire for more. (CSA): You’re speaking to a lot of my favorite things, which we’ll talk about more in your writing, and I was thinking as you were talking about that, of the poem that I mentioned to you before of a “(sugar plum).” But one of the ways that I think you explore connection and loss is through these poems that look through the lens, or across the lens, of different generations of Black women. There's several poems where the speaker has an interlocutor who seems to be a mother or grandmother, their mother or grandmother. Can you tell me about your relationships with the women in your life and what makes this such a rich and fascinating topic for you? (JC): Mmm yeah, I take a lot from my relationships with friends in my life, and I am lucky to have so many incredible examples. I guess I was raised mostly by the hands of my maternal grandmother; both of my parents were very present, but as a first generation Canadian myself, my parents are immigrants and worked a lot. They worked a lot in order to keep us in a good and stable household and to give us all of the things that they wanted us to have – both of them coming from Trinidad and Tobago, from a fairly modest island life. And so my grandmother raised me and instilled a lot of the values that I carry today in me, and among them the ones that I value the most is kindness and generosity. I guess I seek that out in other people as well and I hope to perpetuate that as well. I think that those pieces have been really pivotal to some of the healing journeys that I've gone on in my life, and being able to look on myself with kindness and on the people who have been in my lineage – all of us human, all of us mistake-making. I think it is my grandmother, and the strength of my mother, and the wisdom of femmes like Amber Dawn (who's been my editor and a champion for a long time). All of these women who have entered my life at different points have given me little keys and little tools toward healing myself, and I think because of that, healing my bloodline as well. (CSA): So you're a performer as well as a poet, and many people have come to know your poetry through performance. Are there techniques that you use to bring performative elements into your poetry as it's written, or do you see reading poetry as a fundamentally different experience from watching it performed? (JC): This is a great question! I do believe that they are different experiences. I don't know if I would say fundamentally different because there are so many threads that that bind them together, and I do believe that every poem should be read aloud at least once even if it's just in the privacy of one's own space. I think there are things – tools – that we're afforded on the stage that don't travel with us to the page, and vice versa. I think one of the biggest initial challenges (and then joys) for me in the process of moving some of the poems to the page was learning that there were some things that wouldn't translate, and figuring out what would be there instead; What shape the poem would take, what boldness in which areas, and how I would imbue the words on the page with those little indicators that you would find on the stage – like a half smile, or a raised voice in one moment or another – so that was a challenge for me, and I wasn't absolutely sure that I was up to the task. But once I started the work it actually became really joyful, this great game that I had to navigate to discover what the voice of the poem is going to be on the page, and how I was going to bring that to life. And mostly that came to life through shape and form that felt unique to each poem. I don't really adhere to any traditional forms other than I think there's a couple of haiku in the book and maybe a little bit of rhyming couplet (she giggles) once or twice. Other than that, the forms that appear are just of my design and they were created to support each poem to make sure that they had a voice that felt appropriate. (CSA): Can you talk about that in some specifics? You mentioned trying to translate a smile to the page – Are there examples of things like that that you can share? (JC): I think space lives in these poems that certainly. The pauses that I would take on stage are articulated in some of the spaces that creep into the poems. Certainly I've I've used capitalization in the book specific to the rise of voice; I don't really use capitalization throughout the book in other spaces with the exception of a couple of names, and that was quite intentional. I think that there are places where certain words lean or, for instance, there's one that I really had a lot of joy conceptualizing for myself. It was a piece that is part two of a three-part poem entitled “Hard to Tell If This Is Just the Internet or Another Dream Where I'm In Front of the Class In Only My Dirty Underwear” (Clara laughs), and the second poem is a poem about – or the second part of the poem – is a piece about a dream that I've had, and it's one of my most terrifying dreams. It's a really about being frozen in this moment of being observed by outsiders or by family, by friends, by community, and feeling shame in that moment. It draws some parallels between my my relationship with the internet and that particular dream. But the way that I tried to articulate that creeping fear that appears in the poem is through the weight of the text on the page; so it begins with a very light gray, but as the liquid on the floor is creeping towards me in this poem, the text starts to fade from a light gray into a deep black on the page. And that was a way that I tried to articulate what would have been this slow paced creeping in my voice as I perform it on the stage, and I hope it serves its own purpose there. (CSA): A lot of artistry to it, I can tell. So I think this is a good time to have you start reading some of the poems that you've chosen for us. If you don't mind, let's start with "They Said We Wouldn't Need These Life Jackets On Dry Land." (JC): I would love to. Is it okay for me to accompany myself with an instrument? (CSA): Oh by all means, yeah! (JC): Okay, so I've just pulled out my little eight string ukulele, and her name is Marshmallow. She accompanies me most times that I am on stage. She's a good pal to have. This piece is entitled “They Said We Wouldn't Need These Life Jackets On Dry Land.” (JC begins strumming a gentle tune on her ukelele that underscores her reading.) Mama remembers herself a little girl, turned away from a birthday pool party Mama remembers herself, a little girl, turned away Before we fly from Trinidad to the small island we drive up the hill to stay in the big hotel Now, newly renovated, it has stood on the same perch for the better part of a century Mama remembers herself a little girl turned away from a birthday pool party because this big North American Hotel didn't yet let brown girls bathe themselves in full sunlight somehow scared the world would be hypnotized by the shine Probably even Mama didn't know she was a diamond in a pool of glass The way they treated her Today, I saw a small blonde haired girl drift back and forth When we finally reached the hotel, nearly 50 years later, standing new and shiny in the same cursed spot we learn that the pool is the last piece of renovations It will not open until after we leave Today I saw a small blonde haired girl drift back and forth, back and forth Impossibly buoyant child carried upward, atop a weightlessness so vast and deep that she could not touch her feet to the bottom The big blue stretched out around her, a clean white tile framing the scene and it's perimeter Mama was a little girl once once I was too maybe always will be someplace After hours of travel I pull the tiny computer from my pocket Eye each blue image pouring from its screen Everyone erupting new color some unknown and yet beloved brown face smiling after another a newsreel of necessary medicine dancing dark girl pops her shoulder in my direction, mean mugs until the camera looks away brown skin boy and his father blow each other kisses with a tenderness the quenches my dreams The remedy is loving each other harder loving these brown bodies more than water, and deeper still Mama remembers herself Mama remembers herself Mama remembers (JC brings the soft whimsical underscoring on her ukelele to an end) (CSA): That was lovely, thank you. (JC): Thank you, Thank you Marshmallow. (They both giggle) (CSA): I'm curious because you brought Marshmallow and because you raised it, what the role is of music in your performances? (JC): Music feels so important to me. It feels like an anchor. It feels like a way of setting an environment before my voice even reaches the stage, to hold a container for the piece that hopefully is adequate to carry people through so that we don't depart from the poem before it is done its job. I think that music has its own quality of tying us together in emotion, in an emotional context, and I think laying that ground work before the poem even begins… Yeah, I feel like I've just gotten a great introduction. Now I can walk on stage, yeah. (CSA): It's also— (JC): While I am a performer, I am quite an introvert and I do still get shy and nervous every time I step on the stage. I think having the music with me feels like a grounding element for me, and also a reminder of the way that I've come to the stage, and part of that is through my collaboration as the poet with other musicians and bands. And that's been a big part of my education as a performer. (CSA): Is there a stability to the music that goes with each poem, or does it vary performance to performance? (JC): Most of the poems are matched with pieces of music that they belong to, they are sort of nested within specific pieces. And occasionally they switch, sometimes by request of someone that I'm collaborating with, or sometimes because of a particular need or mood or energy in the room I might adapt it. Sometimes I just want to try something fresh and different, and it succeeds, and other times it requires revision. (She chuckles) But yeah, I do have some standards, for sure. (CSA): Let's talk about the poem itself, and I guess the first thing I wanted to ask you about is the title: “They Said We Wouldn't Need These Life Jackets On Dry Land.” What does it mean to you? (JC): Oh, it means so many things! I think that, well of course first there's this reference to being on the water, being in some voyage on the water. As a person of Afro-Caribbean descent, it calls back to the middle passage, to the slave trade and all of the things that have remained in the DNA of people who exist as part of that diaspora – including the inheritance of misinformation and self-criticizing hatred, self-deprecating rhetoric that has been placed there as a means to devalue and dismiss. I think that some of that finds its way into our psyches, like I said into our DNAs. And this inheritance of trauma – I think I see it as part of my healing practice in my life, to try and untangle some of those pieces. Some of those pieces of shame that don't belong to me, and don't belong to my family,and that need to be set down. And so I think I recognize in that piece that the pieces that were coming up for me were all of these little things that people don't even necessarily tie to that history. You know, my mother was an adult when she learned to swim, when she took swim lessons. And I'm a water baby! I love to be in the sea. That loss I think is actually something that's quite generational for a lot of people of this journey, because so many people from my mother's generation were not allowed to swim in the same pools, and moving to a city and growing up in those spaces there were very few spaces for her and her peers to learn and to feel safe and comfortable. And so that is a piece that is missing from her own experience of being a child, of being an innocent, and just feeling the water on your skin and feeling the joy of that. So the life jackets, I guess, are this idea of safety or resolution with this history that I think is assumed by the greater culture here, this idea that slavery, that the civil rights movement, that all of those pieces are so far in our past that we don't need them where we are right now, and the reality is that they live with us. They persist, and we need to find ways to undo those dangers that still live in our in our bodies. →→→Ad Break (CSA): My guest today is author Jillian Christmas, whose collection of poems, The Gospel of Breaking, came out this past March. One of the other things that I've noticed through your poetry in general is the way you play with pronouns; there's often a They or You or an I, or some combination. What's the function of those pronouns for you? What do they represent? (JC): I'm a person who exists in unconventional relationships I could say. I'm a non-monogamous, and in the poems about relationships (love, lover-ships, romantic relationships…), the pronouns often switch because I have multiple partners and it's important to me that they're all seen in my work. I live in a cohabitation relationship that is often seen as just heteronormative, and it's important that my queerness is not erased by that. I speak to all of the loves of my life in my work; I don't call them by name, but I give them each their proper due, I hope. I think in other pieces, the “They” and “You”, I try to… I hesitate to use the invitational “You”, especially in poems that involve pieces that I regard as trauma or harm because I don't want to force the reader into a space that they don't need to be in, and that they haven't asked to be in, or in a position where they would be the person doing harm. So I am careful with that one, but it's hard to erase “You” entirely. (Both laugh.) It definitely pops in there, for sure. And hopefully I think that I make an effort to place it where the reader can feel comfortable to be seen in that. A lot of the love poems involve the word “You.” (CSA): This poem that you just read is divided into three sections, and there's this refrain – ”Mama remembers herself” – that’s structured a little bit differently every time; pieces are added or taken away from it. Can I ask you to talk about that, and the role of memory in that concept, and in the way that it changes and how the poems structure interacts with it? (JC): I think that repetition is such a gift in poetry, and I use it so frequently on the stage as a callback so that the audience gets to time travel with me and jump around and still have these grounding elements and these anchors. That specific line – “mama remembers” – it was the initiator of the poem. As I was traveling with my mother and my father to my mother's house in Trinidad, and then on to my father's/my paternal grandmother's house, she recalled the story for me. We went, as the poem says, we went to stay in this hotel that she had remembered from her youth, and it was meant to be this moment of return where she would be able to have the things that she didn't have in her youth, and obviously that doesn't happen in that moment. Yeah, I think that the healing that I talked about earlier is in the way that we get to reinvent our memories, or get to revisit them and re-empower ourselves in those moments by correcting the wrong that was done, even if it's just in our own words or in our own minds. And so the remembering that happens at the beginning of the piece is quite painful. It's that memory of being turned away, as I say, and as we move through the poem, Mama remembers herself, and I think that that is the crux of it. The crux of the healing is that she remembers. The poem calls like a spell for her to remember the core of herself and those pieces that were not seen in the moments when they should have been. (CSA): Well, and that's such an unusual syntax too, right? “Mama remembers herself.” It really makes you focus on the “herself” part, on the way that she changes her perceptions of herself or her memories of herself, or who she is calling forth, as you move through the different experiences. Well let's move to the next poem you've chosen for us, “But Have You Tried?” (JC): Now this one, for those who are listening and have never seen the book, kind of lives on the page in a long dipping, and, well, it seems to me that it kind of almost runs away. (Clara giggles) It's called, “But Have You Tried?” (She does not play Marshmallow to underscore this text.) Have you wedded yourself to the edge of a knife, braided your names together like a promise, run your sweet voice until all of the valleys echo, echo hollow? Have you swam beneath possibility, carried the cross of an ending, found the bottom of your own seeking, drunk the false venom of delight, climbed back up the drain made your way out, dripped in the sacred, filthy as all human and alive. (CSA): Tell me about this poem: What was your writing process like for it? Was it really similar, is it the same for all of your poetry, or was it different from the last one that you read? (JC): I would say that it was quite different. This one came out all in one piece, with (of course) the edits that came afterwards, but initially it came in one piece, which is not always how they come. The last piece, actually, was birthed in several different places: a part in Vancouver, part in Trinidad and Tobago, and part in Banff in Alberta. This piece came really quite like a rush, sort of like that feeling of being sucked down the drain; it poured out of me. To me it was part call and part response, I guess. It felt like this question of, I'm a person who lives with various mental health… negotiations, I'll say (she chuckles), and living with depression and anxiety and whatever other atypical things my brain wants to do, and I know that that experience is something that people sometimes approach with this question of… or this desire to want to help by asking this question of, “What have you not done yet?” And so that becomes a question internally as well. It can appear in a shameful way, and regardless of its desire to help, the question alone can prompt these feelings of shame that are really not helpful in that space. So that's where the poem begins, like what have you… have you tried everything?And it goes that everything that is asked are all of these adventures in hardship, and also in exploration of self. Some of them are descriptive of some of the physical challenges that come up, and some others are more emotional stretching and all of these pieces. But I think to me, the turn in the poem is the realization that these dirty and gritty pieces of life are the things that make us holy and sacred and worthy, and all of those things that maybe are dismissed by that shame. This trying and grinding is what the living is about, and so that's where I end up at the end of the poem, is in this place of sacred humanity. (CSA): I love everything you just said. I am also a person who lives with depression and anxiety as part of I make up. I like the phrase, “mental health negotiations.” I'm going to use that from now on. (both laugh) (JC): Thank you. (CSA): One of the things that really struck me as you were talking was the way that this “fixing” approach – the “have you tried… have you tried” – in some ways fundamentally misunderstands the psychology of things like depression and anxiety. Because, as you said, so much of what we need in those moments is to live in acceptance of the messiness and the feelings that we have, and the “have you tried…?” is just another way; it's offering more chances to get away from that messiness which can really compound the problem. (JC): Absolutely. And distance us from ourselves, I think. Yeah. (CSA): Yeah. (JC): Yeah, absolutely. (CSA): Stylistically this poem is very different, as you mentioned, from “They Said We Wouldn't Need These Life Jackets…”. The lines are short, often only one or two words, and there’s kind of a sharpness to it as a result. When you were talking about it coming out all in a rush, it didn't occur to me that that was necessarily your process, but I can see the swiftness in the way that the… like, there's a swiftness to the cadence as you read it, either me as a reader or me hearing you read it yourself. It’s also reflecting some of the words and phrases that you chose – like, “the edge of a knife”, “the false venom of the light” – and I was curious how you settled on form for this poem, and how you navigate different forms of styles in your writing in general? (JC): I really follow the voice of the poem itself; What is it asking for? How can I lean into what would be my offering on the stage, to bring it more into realization on the page? That poem, like… I don't know how to articulate it better than that; like going down the drain feeling. I felt sort of like in The Wizard of Oz, like the falling and falling and falling and falling, through all of this; the uselessness of these sorts of questions in the midst of what is the experience that's being missed, right? I think when we're having… when we're in these places of self-exploration and excavation it's like, some of these questions I think are designed to distract us from that. Like, “have you tried working out?” “Have you been eating your vegetables?” “Have you drank enough water?” …Like, actually, what's happening in this moment is this exploration inside of myself, and that's the thing that I'm doing. That's the thing that's important. I think that slipping past all of those things into what was the root of the experience really felt like it could be visual on the page. I think that because I don't come from a background – I didn't go to university for writing. I went to school a couple of times but I never finished (for various things that were not creative writing), and so I don't have that background that informs the way that my my work sits on the page; I just have to adventure through it, and bring my what my education is in oral tradition – that's my background. That's what my training is. (CSA): The next poem you've selected for us is “the Woman Is Made of Eyes.” Why don't you set it up for us before you read it. (JC): There are a series of poems in the book that all of the titles are in parentheses; each of those poems comes from a visit with my paternal grandmother in Tobago. All of the pieces that are in parentheses are meant to be held in that container of space, on the tiny island of Tobago with my 99-year-old grandmother who lives on the side of a mountain and is one of the fiercest women I have ever met in my life. A little scary, to be honest. I come from that, and that's pretty incredible and powerful. This piece, well, my grandmother at the time she was 99 when I wrote this, but she's going on 101! I think that I consider what it's going to be like when she's not on this physical plane with me, and the differences in our ideas of the world. Being generations apart, what her idea of the proper things a woman should do and and how she should behave are very different from my idea of womanhood. Also I have so much respect and honor for my grandmother's journey so I know that there are lessons there for me. I also know that there are some lessons that are not for me, and that there is some dissonance between our two perspectives on the world. And so this is some articulation of that, and it goes like this: (She does not play Marshmallow to underscore this text.) Woken by my alarm 6:30 a.m. just early enough to beat Mommy to the kitchen I rise and dress meet her making her way through the hallway catch the raw edge of a woman blowing through the corridors of a house she has built from scratch knows by touch cooking in her kitchen, beneath her ever-present gaze, I find myself a little worried for the day that Mommy becomes like the wind scoops up her whole singing being and ascends into the ether moving through my house like a cool breeze just over my shoulder What will she think about the way I clean my kitchen cook my meat speak my own tongue stitch my hems fuck my lovers what lessons will she lay for me to find in the heat of fresh pepper seeds or the steady slope of my woman's neck I study Mommy's face the fragile ringed cloth of it her hands the accountants of so much time Sometimes when you talk to me, is not me, but an angel you speak with I know Mommy, of course I know (CSA): The central metaphor here is the wind, and you explore a lot of different angles of it — it's speed (a woman blowing through the corridors), the way it can be comforting (a cool breeze), and the ephemeral nature of it (Mommy ascends into the ether); And for me, at least, it captured the multifaceted nature of the relationships that we, as women or femmes, have with our matrilineages. Was that something you intended? (JC): I think that there's that piece that I just can't grasp or hold on to. There isn't any map to follow, and I think that part of what I've learned from my lineage is that we need to choose our own way, and that is the way of the women in my family. Both of my grandmothers lived in very unconventional ways for the women of their time: my grandmother in that house that she built for 50 years alone while her husband lived on the coast, and my maternal grandmother who traveled well into her old age and had two daughters and never married. I think that both of them are adventurers and my mother is another unique one, full of strength and certainty, and very different from myself. I think that at first we model ourselves after our mothers, sometimes, if we are gifted with mothers in our lives. I think that that's a thing that women are trained to do, is to model ourselves after our mothers. I've learned that I don't get to take all of those pieces, they don't belong to me — those pieces of my mother's or my grandmother's stories. But the ferocity, the inherited wisdom, the adventurer, the choose your own adventure — all of that is what I can hold on to, and everything else is fleeting. I think that that element of the wind is sown into that idea that I have of lineage and inheritance, even the understanding of the the characters that show up in my own history. (CSA): I love that, and I'm just loving listening to talk about your mother and your grandmother and the people in your matrilineage. Tell me about those last lines: “Sometimes when you talk to me, is not me, but an angel you speak with.” What does the speaker know when she says, “I know Mommy. of course I know”? (JC): My grandmother is a deeply spiritual woman and yet I don't know that she ever found a home for that spirituality, other than her own definitions of it. I've heard stories of her going to every church on the island, every denomination. She would go and it didn't matter, because I think she understood an element that I really hold as a truth for myself as well, and that is that the shape of the house doesn't matter. That the sacredness is internal, and the fact that you are moved to celebrate that is what matters. I think my grandmother has all of these ways that that shows up in her own life and her own ritual and her own practices. She's one that is deeply invested in the dream world; She doesn't dismiss dreams in any way, and she doesn't value what happens in the waking world more than what happens in the dream world. She says these things sometimes that are really deep and really cryptic, and I think are just elements of her channeling that energy, that source that she pulls from. That is what the speaker knows, is that that eternal energy — whether it be an angel some other knowing outside of just the body — that that is vibrant and alive inside of my grandmother. →→→AD BREAK 2 (CSA): If you're just joining me, my guest today is author Jillian Christmas, whose collection of poems, The Gospel of Breaking, came out this past March. Well I'm going to ask you to read one more that I chose, purely because it's my favorite, and that is “(sugar plum).” What can you tell us about it? (JC): It is a piece that guided me through some really difficult exploration, I think, in returning to a place that could be called “home.” It's so challenging to even understand what that word means: home. But it's the name that my family gives Trinidad and Tobago. You know, you hear that a lot. So I went home to find myself a little bit. Home is an interesting thing because it's not always as cozy as it sounds. (she laughs) What I unearthed while I was there were a lot of links that I had not understood previously about my grandmother's experience, of her story, of our family story, the hardships that she has faced, the longing that she has experienced in her life, and I kind of match that on top of some of the longings that I have experienced. In this poem, a lot of what that longing leads toward is this character, or this articulation of masculinity in one form or another (specifically for her, her father). There are elements in there where I reach for that, an understanding of that as well; My own family and my own paternal roots. Then they're also the figures in my own life, in current day and in past relationships, that step into that role. Not necessarily the father, but in that space that's held. To me, the lay of this poem is a realization or a new understanding that the power in the poem doesn't rest with the idea of power, which is in this place of masculinity, but the power in the poem actually rests in this incredible unearthing of this matrilineage, like you said, of women who can and will fiercely care for themselves. The piece is called “(sugar plum),” and it goes like this: (She does not play Marshmallow to underscore this text.) mommy sat down on the porch to put her foot up. She has so much to tell me today, about the iguana and how it could make aunty run, about the good bush that washes away the bad spirits anyone might put on me. I must take some to charlotteville and bathe with it in the ocean. She tells me too many times about the fish I am already sure I do not want to eat. But I listen. mommy is ninety-nine and she has earned all of her indulgences. So she tells me again about the house she built, how no man helped her do it. When I ask about her mother, she tells me her maiden name was murray. I want to know more about her mother, my great grandmother. I want to know what she looked like and how she smelled and what she did to stay alive. Was her hair long like mine, was her skin dark like /uncle/? mommy doesn’t talk much about her mother. Says she liked her mother fine, but she loves her /daddy/. So I listen to her talk about my /great grandfather/ defratis. She tells me he was nice, and fair, with beautiful hair. Half guyanese and half portugese. She tells me he had plenty money, was a rum dealer with lots of business, rum shops here and there. She tells me how he died at 30 years and how a woman who worked with him told her the story. Some jealous man put poison in his rum so he could steal up all of his business. She asks me if I understand. I do, but as always I have a tough time telling the difference between truth and myth. Satisfied of my understanding she goes on. She tells me how she loved him. How she cried and threw herself down in the street, just a little girl of five, begging her /father/ not to go to work. She only met him this once, but she loved him her whole life. When she rolled around and threw a fit to stop him leaving, he reached for his belt, began to unbuckle to lash her into better behaviour, but he stopped himself. Picked her up out of the road and carried her into the store. He told the young woman in there to cook some food and share with her and then he was gone. mommy says that if her /daddy/ hadn’t died, she would’ve gone with him, travelled to portugal and all over. She says he would’ve left her some money and she wouldn’t have had to work so hard all of her life. Things would’ve been different. She would not have stayed in charlotteville, or married /my grandfather/, ( she doesn’t say much about this but I think I already know he was a heavy handed man). I listen. Eventually, in a moment of gratitude I say that if things had been different I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t exist. That’s what I’m telling you, she replies. My gratitude melts into a kind of passive sadness, she has already measured this option, has found it acceptable. I say, but what about your children? I would’ve had different children. She doesn’t say it with malice, but a tepid resignation. I repeat BUT I WOULDN’T EXIST! No, you wouldn’t be my child. It’s a reasonable compromise for her, a whole life, house, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren still, gambled on trust for /a man/ only met once, gambled on the kindness of her being fed, instead of beaten. I think about the longing I have suffered in my life. How I have stretched toward people who would not have stayed even if there were no venom. The promise of possibility is a trap that has kept me from the joys of my own life. And what joys am I missing, in clinging to a /daddy/ who is always going, always walking toward poison and away from food? What love do I dishonour and ignore, in searching for a face I hardly know? Let them go to their poison /great grandfathers/ and /daddies/ too. Let them go and leave behind children crying as they will, mourning as we do. Let them go, and let us see what wild plants grow in their absence. What medicines will spring from a line of women with lost fathers and distant /daddies/? A line of maidens and witches who carry their own names and build their own houses, and birth their own bloodlines and cook their own food. (CSA): There's a beautiful line near the end of this poem that I think of in a lot of ways as the pivot or turn; “I think about the longing I have suffered in my life. How I have stretched toward people who would not have stayed even if there were no venom. The promise of possibility is a trap that has kept me from enjoying the joys of my own life.” And I underlined that, I highlighted it, I circled it. It's such a great section and I think it really speaks to some of the themes you keep bringing up around longing, and what that really means in our lives. There's a lot of pain in what you hear, in what we hear the speaker say. Her suffering. And yet the framing is still kind of positive — the promise of possibility. Tell me about that. (JC): That line, when it came to be, I was thinking about a relationship that had ended that felt to me like I had ended prematurely, and I was stuck in a loop of thinking about what could have been in that relationship if that person had stayed. If I had been able to stay. In the process of that loop and the two and a half years of the past in pondering that question I also came across the question of, what was here, in my life? What was presently supporting me and keeping me alive and filled that I wasn't able to pay attention to because I was chasing after this dream of what could have been in this space, and potentially dishonoring all of these incredible gifts that were already here in my lap. That relationship has since had opportunity for healing and some growth, and I'm now, you know, I really value those moments of longing because I think they have a way of bringing into clarity what it is that we need and what it is that we have. It was a way of carving out of my own voice what I needed to ask for, and also a reminder for myself of what I needed to pay attention to. Because to not pay attention to those gifts feels like the the greater potential loss. (CSA): I found myself really fascinated by the way that you negotiate gender in this poem; The way that you/the speaker is fascinated by mommy's mother, but mommy only wants to talk about her father. And it intersects with all those things we just talked about around longing. Your poetry often showcases multiple perspectives, particularly in poems like this where there are multiple women in your family, or friends and your family, who you're talking about. What do those multiple perspectives do for you, both in this poem and more generally? (JC): I think that's kind of how my brain works most of the time, is that it's always asking for more. I don't ever really feel satisfied with a decision, or with a perspective or point of view unless I think that I have done my best to at least attempt to pivot and see what else I'm not seeing. I know that there are endless possibilities and that every one of our experiences are so different even as we experience them together. I think, especially in the context of poems like this where I am bringing in not actual members of my family (because I can't ever capture a person and in just a couple lines of a poem), but there are elements and characters and voices that come in that represent and speak to some of those relationships, and I want to honor that by offering as much autonomy to those voices, and as much fullness as I experience for myself. I mean, I think that people in my life sometimes find it frustrating, but my process is to examine things from every angle before I can come to a decision or an answer or a conflict and understand what it is that I really feel about a thing. I guess that's just been always a part of my process, is to quietly analyze as much as I can so that I don't feel like I am cutting anyone short or denying them the fullness of humanity that I expect for myself. (CSA): What's next for you Jillian? (JC): Well, it's a strange world out there these days (both laugh) so, I was meant to be on a cross-country tour in the next couple days to be showcasing this debut work with some incredible accomplices: Amber Dawn and Vivek Shreya, who both have also phenomenal new works out. That was my plan for the spring, and it has turned into a parade of zoom conferences so that's mostly what I’ve been up to. But I'm also a curator/organizer, as you said, and I'm helping to curate a stratagem conference, which is a conference around workplace justice reimagined. I get to work alongside the incredible activist Cicely Belle Blaine, and a number of other phenomenal humans. So I’m doing some of that work, writing more poems, and I've just had a great opportunity to do a collaboration for a poetry month with the Museum of Anthropology here, so just showcasing some of those commissions and works. It’s what's on the next little while, and then we'll see what the world has in store for us I guess. (Clara laughs) (CSA): Thank you so much for joining me today— (JC): Thank you so much, Clara, it's been a pleasure. (CSA): To learn more about Jillian or to order a copy of The Gospel of Breaking, visit arsenalpulp.com. Catch Story Behind the Story on the first Friday of every month from 5 to 6 p.m. during the second hour of Talk of the Bay, right here on KSQB 90.7 FM. To share your thoughts on this or other shows, drop me a line at Clara@ksqd.org. Next month I will be talking to writer Kawai Strong Washburn about his highly acclaimed baby novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors. Story Behind the Story is produced for KSQD 90.7 FM by me, Clara Sherley-Appel. Our sound engineer is Lanier Sammons. He also wrote our theme.