Finding the Words

I am beyond proud that my poem and artwork, both entitled Finding the Words, have been published in the Spring 2024 literary magazine, one in which the pleasures of being subscribed to has been edifying. For my work to be included among so many esteemed writers and poets has been more than I thought possible and I thank the editors for thinking that my work was worthy of inclusion.

Finding the Words was conceived while doing the John Willard residency at the Art Gallery of Burlington, Ontario, Canada 2018-2019, possible because of the support of James Hart. From this experience I produced a body of work called Worn Worlds, a unique exhibition in that it did not only feature my work, but also invited the community to participate in its presentation. You can read more about it on my website HERE. The parameters of the residency required I employ recycled textiles and garments, and from these creations and garments,  poems, essays and prose emerged. The ideas that bubbled up for this work was in turn ignited by a friend, Pennina Barnett, who I had visited in London, UK about a year earlier. She had directed me to a few texts that focused on the effects of cloth and textiles on our lives which I found not only immensely inspiring but moving.

The various roles society demands that women assume create fragmentation and division of self. In women’s roles as mother, sister, aunt, daughter, friend, professional, employee, employer, it often seems that too many people want pieces of you, demand more of you than you can give. All this creates a disconnect with the self and threatens well-being and wholeness, hence the reason my self portrait is fragmented, barely discernable below the text printed and embroidered on it. 

Each art work created is an entry point into myself, uncovering me and making me visible to others. This is especially true of Finding the Words, where my full-length portrait is curtained by the text and painting, nebulous and numinous. My silent voice makes itself heard. 

Text plays a more prominent role in my life, at times appearing to eclipse the visual art I am creating. The textile collage mirrors how words and images shape my thinking process. Slowly they emerge to form strands of words that are then stitched into a cohesive whole. My artistic process parallels my awkward, tedious and meticulous writing journey. Each word is carefully examined for flaws and tested for its quality and authenticity.

Threadbare, printed and embroidered canvas, used silk dolls dress. 

Our personal narratives are pieced together by fragments of our past including the textiles that have accompanied us along the journey, imbuing them with memory and feelings. Embedded in cloth are our stories, our histories, our identities and our cultures. Cloth arouses thoughts of warmth, comfort, protection and intimacy but also paradoxically, confinement, containment, fragility, and impermanence. So much of women’s labour is invisible, impermanent and unseen. Domestic work is consumed, disintegrates, dissolves, disappears, is forgotten, is invisible...so many of these hours regarded as insignificant and inconsequential.

Branded. 51cm x 47cm. cotton canvas, garment and domestic textile tags. machine stitched, embroidered. 2019

Textiles are witnesses and recorders of our daily lives. Our skin, the food we eat and other particles become imbedded within the intersections of the threads. They absorb scents from our immediate environment and those that emanate from our bodies. Our fingers recall their feel, surfaces, textures, and materiality. The sensors in our fingers like threads dressed on the loom of our mind, unspool our feelings and our re-memorying of a person or events.

Triptych: Rhythms of Daily Lives - #3.

25cm x 25cm. ~Used cotton tea towel, buttons, thread. 2019

Clothes are our autobiography and our identity. Through them, we “can trace the connections of love across the boundaries of absence, and of death, because cloth is able to carry the absent body, memory, genealogy, as well as” the characteristics of its materiality.

Website

Instagram @lines.by.line

After the Rain

 

The railing on the balcony is strung with glistening beads of rain, as though a rosary. I pause at each one and say a prayer, supplicating the powers that be, for my writing to break through the barrier of  private and personal,  and into the expansive public domain. I hope my writing endeavours will go beyond doing it as a necessary part of my daily process, my daily living, my daily routines, and that it becomes one where I step out into the world and am sheltered by the umbrella of professional practice, into the territory of published authors/poets. It seems a natural progression at this point in my life. 

Being longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize is a big step in that direction, and it is indeed, a great privilege to be recognized by esteemed and practiced authors. It is the emerging of the sun after the rain of rejections over the last number of years. The story, Asylum, takes place in both Quebec City and Toronto. It centres around the last week of my mother's life, while focusing on the impacts of deinstitutionalization during the 1960s and 70s. In-house care for those with mental health issues and residential schools that took care of children whose parents were unable to for one reason or another, were discontinued, with the thinking that it benefitted them more not to be 'confined.' The residents of these facilities were released into the community, returned to their families and if they didn't have a family, into 'community-based homes' which were often dingy and in disrepair. Whereas for children, foster homes were often less than an ideal option, many becoming victims of assorted abuses. 

On September 14 CBC will announce the shortlist, and September 21, the winners. To even be on the longest, I consider a great privilege, but to make it any further I would almost consider divine intervention! 

To see the full announcement you can go HERE. 

Letters

I don't know if you can ever look at me the same way. Ever understand me. Ever think I was nice or even capable of loving someone. I don’t know if you can ever forgive me or even consider continuing to be my friend if I told you this one thing about me: that even when I knew my eighty-five year old father was on his deathbed, there was no doubt in my mind or heart that I would be at his side. I refused to  see him. Though his sister, my aunt, called to tell me he was dying, I had asked her if there was anything he needed to tell me. She said no. That settled it. How can you forgive someone when they haven’t asked to be forgiven because as far as they were concerned, nothing needed forgiving. If he didn't need my forgiveness for his long list of abandonments, abuses, and negligences, if he didn't need my forgiveness for being absent from my life, then there was no point in my being by his side. In my books, forgiveness is a two way street. If he hasn't asked for forgiveness, I cannot give it.

That was about ten years ago, maybe more. 

About  five years ago, as I was clearing stuff out of my basement. I came across letters written to me over the previous forty five years. The last one may have been in the nineteen-nineties, when email took over, and letter writing began to vanish along with typewriters and landline telephones. There was one box of letters i couldn’t bring myself to open. Feelings of nausea swept over me and I kept putting it off, turning away everytime I got near it. In the meantime I had signed up for my first creative writing course…nothing too threatening….which was offered through the TDSB's Continuing Education program. It was in that class that I described in great detail an event that happened to me when I was fourteen. When asked to read the story aloud, I was shaking, and my mouth felt like rubber tires that had lost their air. I could hardly enunciate those words describing the scene of that trauma and the words I managed to utter…..”you’re killing me.” These are words I said to my father as he was strangling me and very nearly succeeded. That class unsealed the envelope of my silence, and energy and strength and fearlessness flowed out of me. I’m ready,  I said to myself, to read each and every one of those letters my father wrote to me in those subsequent years for the last 25 years, up until 1992.  I was hoping it might change the negative impact he had had on me, but instead it only confirmed what i still believed to be true about him - that there was no love for me flowing with the ink that drew out the words, nor between the lines or spaces of words, nor apologies either. Nowhere was there evidence for all I had hoped to be given as his daughter. Instead all I could read into his letters was how he clinged to my sense of duty as his daughter, yet not ever feeling or expressing his own paternal responsibilities or feelings, nor ever expressing any concern whatsoever, for my well-being.

Feeling like some kind of cathartic transition had occurred, I then decided to shred the letters, and spin them into a yarn, and although i didn’t have a specific project, I knew I would start to incorporate them into my artwork, for me the only means  of transformation, of draining the trauma of this event from my body, and subsequently, changing how I saw this relationship.

While spinning strips from his letters I had the most incredible insight. That the relationship with my father was one that was composed of only letters, even when I was a child living at St. Brigid's Home in Quebec City, where I remained for nine years, until the age of fourteen. The illusion of a relationship consisted of these letters, a relationship that didn’t exist outside of the parameters of an 8 ½” by 11” sheet of paper. Letters, he thought , would be enough to persuade me of my duty to him as his daughter but they did little to bridge the wide divide between us, the distance physically and emotionally that he maintained through the years. I realized that he used his letters to conceal the truth of our relationship. Its funny how one can spend almost an entire life not noticing something that was so evident. He stopped writing to me when I was about thirty because I finally told him what I thought of him: that he had not earned the privilege of being called 'father' or 'dad' because of his absence emotionally and physically, throughout my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Telling him this lifted a huge weight off my shoulders. And from that day, I never heard from him again. If closure means closing the book on a relationship, then you could say, I achieved closure on that day. For so long I had kept that book open hoping to write new chapters in which we could have a relationship but when a person doesn’t love you, its just not possible. Once I could accept that, could accept the hardest thing of all for any child to accept, that a parent doesn’t love you, maybe even hates you, and blames you for all their failures and shortcomings, its very freeing. To live denying what I knew to be true was crazy making. He only wanted the benefits of being a parent, but not the responsibilities that went along with it. 

Recently, while working on my Masters in Creative Writing, I read and  learned a lot about epistolary practice and epistolary novels, and how in fact, letter writing became the jumping off point for novel writing, at first employing the same conventions. I began to see a connection to this letter writing convention as leading me to my own path as a writer. Letter writing was a river, I realized, a vehicle with which to float and paddle and navigate towards the immense ocean of creative writing - fiction, non-fiction, poetry and many other genres.

After reading all this, you may still never want to be my friend. You may never care to understand me. And you are right, and here I quote, Souvankham Thammavongsa while being interviewed at Toronto International Writers Festival, "I'm not that nice." But I am proud of myself for taking care of that inner child and protecting her from a father who didn't love her. I am proud of myself for putting my feelings first and not his, eventhough it took me thirty years to do so. I don't need to forgive him, because now I can thank him. Thank him for the life lessons I learned from him. I learned who not to be. I learned what not to be. I learned to work hard and to love hard and to give a damn, because he could not.

Rejection Confessions

Wind blasts create a thousand dancing veils composed of snowflakes swirling across the landscape. Its hurling and howling makes every moment more dramatic, banging the cedars against the house, whipping leafless trees, their branches flailing as though spindly arms begging to be rescued from its assaults. The wind's soulful voice moans like a Gregorian chant,  and corresponds with my despondency. However this despondency is the door through which I pass to take shelter in the room of Reflection. 

 

Rejection feels like that wind too, sharp and merciless, reminding me of my insignificance in relation to the planet and the billions of people living on this earth. Rejection, like the wind, can be hazardous, undermining determination, it's cold fingers tightening around my throat, threatening to freeze the flow of my words, to stiffen my hand with cramps, to muffle my voice with snowbanks. I may be familiar with the paralyzing effects of rejection yet I am not used to it, eventhough it has followed me all my life. No rejection is worse than that of being rejected by  family. After that, all other rejections seem exponentially less injurious and lacerating. Still, they feel uncomfortable, and they make me question if my reasons for writing are good ones, and reassess my ability and talent. Like the wind, uncertainty and doubts whirl around me, making me lose my footing, obscuring the path to my destination.

 

Rejections come in various guises, or are wrapped in a different arrangements of words or gestures or negligences. The most recent from a literary magazine, didn’t actually send out a rejection letter, and instead emailed a list of those that were accepted for that issue. Among those selected I noticed that none appeared to be over 35, for one. Their selection did not give evidence of the full cultural spectrum that makes up Canada and I wonder if my life is being written out of my country’s literary and social history  because of my cultural heritage, my age, my gender, my social status. Am I considered politically and socially irrelevant and therefore deserve to be overlooked and excluded? In his book, On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche says that "The standard method of destroying writers is casual indifference." Days like today, I find myself thinking, Oh to be attractive, photogenic, youthful, and have the right kind of name! On the heels of that rejection, came another days later. 

I visualize what rejection might look like; give it a shape, colour, texture, odour, sound. Its sounds like fingernails on a blackboard or the scrunching up of a piece of paper in preparation for the wastebasket; its colour and odour that of rotting compost filled with maggots; what it feels like - thousands of pins, possibly spikes, being driven into my flesh. Rejection has trailed me all my life, like a stalker set on vanquishing me. 

What is the lesson it's trying to teach me? 

 

Like so many other situations in life, I have learned that I must stand up to it and stare it in the face; to not be cowed by it; to challenge it and to not be silent about it; to be ready to defend myself if need be; to tell it, ‘you don’t scare me, you don’t intimidate me, and you won’t stop me.’ 

 

Rejection isn’t failure because the main difference is that it is evidence of one's effort to 'succeed'. Neither is failure defeat. Rejection doesn’t mean I am loser or that my writing isn’t worthy of being read. Rejection doesn’t mean readers don't want to read what I’ve written. Rejection doesn’t necessarily occur because of objective choices,  but is a by-product of a process of elimination, using various kinds of criteria, but not necessarily including  whether the writing is any good.

Rejection keeps me humble, reminding me that the world has not been waiting for me with baited breath, eventhough I rush enthusiastically to the blank page, curious and excited to see what it will reveal to me. That page is eager to soak up my words at least.  I practice using this humility as my ally, nurturing my creativity and my ideas. For many, humility doesn’t suit then; feels too belittling and damns them up. Rejection/humility hones me, whittles me to a fine point of focus from which the unique qualities of my writing might emerge. Why? Because to go on after rejection, I am not writing necessarily for anyone else’s approval, but I am writing what I need and have to write about. Rejection has kept me ever vigilant and mindful of my writing process, weighing and measuring my words carefully, much as one would do to maintain a healthy diet and keep one's body fit. Though rejection may keep me humble, I will not permit it to diminish me nor be an obstacle on my path.

 

I have developed various strategies to help take the sting out of rejection. One is by taking the notification and changing the wording and transforming it to a letter of acceptance and congratulations. Visualization is what they call this tactic. Athletes and musicians are just some of the people who use it to aid their success. Taking a moment to remember, cherish and feel gratitude for those submissions that have been successful or accepted or looking at my list of writing achievements also keeps me writing. But one of the most important strategies in my first aid kit is my writing group. We have kept each other going because of our admiration for each other as people and as writers. 

 

To date, I have had over thirty rejections in the course of about eighteen months. Half of them were 'invisible rejections' because the publisher or agent never acknowledged my submission (unless you think automated emails are acknowledgement) so that makes me thankful for those who took the time to respond in one way or another. Thirty is a small number compared to those of other writers who have shared their list.  Marche tells us that he kept track of all his rejections received in his twenties, until they reached the two thousand mark. In one week alone, he received seven.  I've got some catching up to do! Because of rejection, Gertrude Stein self-published her first book, Three Lives, British publishers objected to her use of the English language – her use of repetition - of words, phrases, sentences; of the social class and sexual desires (and repression) of the women she wrote about. According to Marche, "Jack London kept his letters of rejection impaled on a spindle, and eventually the pile rose to four feet, around six hundred rejections. Marcel Proust and Beatrix Potter had to self-publish. It took Agatha Christie five years to find her way into print." He goes on to say that ...."The Diary of Anne Frank was rejected fifteen times, A Wrinkle in Time, twenty six, Gone With the Wind thirty-eight." Whew! Impressive!

So there is a shift in the way I view my rejection list, and it is a list I am now proud of because I see it is a measure of my trying, of my efforts to put my writing out there. It takes courage and strength to do that again and again without it damaging your creativity and disturbing your equanimity. I have come to understand that I am not any worse, or better than many writers; that I am equally deserving of publication; that publishers select authors who fit a certain trending profile, and/or who fulfill their politically- and/or socially-correct interests and agenda. I have come not to take it personally.

Rejection at first blast, deconstructs me, much in the same way that winter suppresses life, stripping it of leaves and burying evidence of plants and flowers, driving animals into hibernation.  In the act of writing (and of creativity), a reconsidering, a remembering and recalling of life lessons arises. Through this process, rejection reconstructs me with resoluteness. And like the natural occurrence of the seasons, spring follows winter, and within me too, a rebirth occurs, followed by a resurrection.  

Melissa Williams  #stephenmarche Stephen Marche #rejection #reflection #renaissaince #rebirth #exclusion #gertrudestein #jacklondon #gonewiththewind #thediaryofannefrank #resoluteness #simasharifa #susanangel #karindoucette

The Clearing

When I read my journals from thirty or more years ago, I've mentioned many times that I wanted so much to be a writer. That longing resided in my fingers while they twitched, words rushing through them like the blood in their veins, words that otherwise, would have remained trapped and invisible.  Words that my mouth and voice could not utter. My hands grasped at the pen and the notebook in those infrequent pauses when I could find time alone to write. I looked forward to those solitary moments when I could retreat into the quiet, my thoughts and feelings rising above the din, as I watched the pen scrambling across the page as though some other being had taken possession of my pen, revealing itself to me. Those blank pages were sometimes the only friendly place I could find, a safe zone, where I knew I would not be maligned or  misunderstood. I cannot say how I would have survived without writing given the challenges that were set the day I was born, and I am not being over-dramatic when I say that. So often during my young adulthood, like many people, I found myself doing jobs that I didn't necessarily want to do, nor were particularly edifying. Post secondary education was not an option for awhile, because all I could manage was just scraping together enough money for food and rent, which sometimes seemed impossible. Still, I was idealistic. I believed that one could make one's dreams come true, if one worked hard enough, if one persisted and at times, insisted. But also if one had the right intentions. Consequently I went on to art college (putting myself in great debt), and had decided that I'd become a tapestry weaver. Carole King's song and album, Tapestry, like the Pied Piper, led me to that path. Prior to graduation from the program, I was told that I could not make a living from it. Huh? why hadn't they told me that before? Yet, I did everything in my power to make that happen, and, when, as they had predicted, I couldn't make a consistent living with tapestry weaving, I went to the University of Guelph to get my B.A. , and then to the University of Toronto to obtain my teacher's certificate, put myself in even greater debt which took me a few decades to recover from. Immediately after graduating, I started teaching high school: Art, English, French and Photography. I lasted five years. The changes happening in the education system among other factors, including my introverted nature, created too much stress for me.  I was not the only one crushed by the pressures and demands. Surveys done by teacher unions at the time said that 50% of graduates from teacher's college would only last five years. Luckily for me, I found a well-paid part-time job teaching weaving to adults that permitted me to continue my practice as an artist and artisan, creating handwoven fashion accessories to sell at various shows in Toronto, such as the One of a Kind, Cabbagetown and the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition, but also to continue making tapestries and textile art which I exhibited around the world. Some of these tapestries were featured in books, such as the one published by Phaidon Press, Tapestry, by Barty Phillips and Micala Sidore's The Art is the Cloth which you can purchase here. 

The only place I wrote daily for decades was in my journal, and I have columns of journals to prove it, never thinking that what I wrote was worthy of being read. As my confidence and self esteem grew, slowly, tentatively, the courage to write for an audience emerged. I started with a few blogs, mostly about weaving and my art/craft events, then, for about ten years, I wrote about other weavers for the Ontario Handweavers and Spinners, based on interviews and visits to each of their studios, when possible. When I was no longer teaching, in 2016,  I began taking Creative Writing courses at the University of Toronto, including with Kim Echlin, Ibi Kaslik, Danila Botha, and David Layton.  In 2020, I completed the Humber School for Writers program with Camilla Gibb as my mentor, over which time, I wrote my first (and still unpublished) novel. In May 2022 I obtained my Masters with Distinction in Creative Writing and Critical Thinking from the University of Gloucestershire, in the UK during which time I worked on my second novel.  

And so began the long, obstacle strewn writing journey, the slow revealing of things I'd been too afraid to share, and too afraid to say, too busy trying to survive to find out, too ashamed to acknowledge and too much in denial to accept. Along the way, many people made me feel so small,  less than them, and I'm sure there will be those who will continue to do so. And yet I thank them,  because in the end, their hardness was the stone upon which I sharpened the blade of my words, not to maim them, but as an implement to forge a path towards a clearing, and in that clearing, the open sky of my truth , and the wide open fields of my self.