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Still No Word

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Happy Pride Atlantic Canada!

Queer writers have always written outside the margins. In honour of Pride festivals across the region from July 16 to August 22, spanning St. John’s to Moncton, Atlantic Books Today has complied a list of queer-friendly books and authors.

From social justice essays, to books on same sex parenting and pregnancy complications, transgender issues, Aboriginal ancestry, life in exile, disability, poems about solitude, stories of coming out, sex, family secrets, first person LBGTQ monologues, and a throwback graphic novel, East Coast queer lit offers a kaleidoscope.

Still No Word Shannon Webb-Campbell Breakwater BooksStill No Word
By Shannon Webb-Campbell
$16.95, paperback, 72 pp.
Breakwater Books, March 2015

As the inaugural winner of EGALE Canada Human Rights Trust Out In Print Literary Award, Shannon Webb-Campbell’s Still No Word charts a constellation of lovers, Aboriginal ancestry, and what makes us human. Her poems, “On The Sidewalk,” honours gay rights activist Raymond Taavel, “Emotional Philosophy,” explores lesbian love and grief, and “Because We’re Going To Camp Mockingee,” gives nod to queer marriage.

 

Out Proud: Stories of Pride, Courage, and Social Justice
Edited by David Gosse
$19.95, paperback, 250 pp.
Breakwater Books, June 2014

With over 50 essays on the diverse experiences of LGBTTIQQ2SA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Transgendered, Intersexual, Queer, Questioning, 2-Spirited and Allies) across Canada, editor sociologist Dr. Douglas Gosse has collected a well-crafted and accessible anthology produced in partnership with Egale Canada Human Rights Trust.

 

Queer Monologues: Stories of LBGT YouthQueer Monologues: Stories of LBGT Youth
By For the Love of Learning
$9.95, paperback, 52 pp.
Breakwater Books, March 2014

Produced by For the Love of Learning, an arts-based non-profit organization working with youth in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Queer Monologues: Stories of LGBT Youth is a collection of lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender theatrical pieces exploring gender, hope, sexuality, the personal and performance.

 

jackytarJackytar
By Douglas Gosse
$19.95, paperback, 286 pp.
Breakwater Books, May 2005

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English defines a jackytar as a Newfoundlander of mixed French and Mi’kmaq descent, mainly from the west coast of the island. Award-winning researcher and writer Douglas Gosse’s Jackytar is a novel based on protagonist Alexandre Murpy, who journeys through homophobia, racism, language, family secrets and Aboriginal heritage.

 

Blank bookcover with clipping path

Exiled for Love: The Journey of an Iranian Queer Activist
By Arsham Parsi with Marc Colbourne
$20.95, paperback, 228 pages
Roseway Publishing, May 2015

Exiled for Love: The Journey of an Iranian Queer Activist is a narrative non-fiction story of Arsham Parsi’s story of coming out, and as a result being issued a warrant for his arrest, which leads him to leave his country. Parsi flees to Canada where he starts the Iranian Railroad for Queer Refugees.

 

Double Pregnant

Double Pregnant: Two Lesbians Make a Family
By Natalie Meisner
$20.95, paperback, 224 pages
Roseway Publishing, March 2014

Natalie Meisner’s Double Pregnant is a true-tale account of starting a family with her wife Viviën. As a person of colour, Viviën was adopted into a caucasian family, together the couple decides they want their children to have a personal connection with their sperm donor. In an unconventional attempt to find a donor, the couple goes on a series of awkward and hilarious dates.

 

hot wet and shakingHot, Wet, and Shaking: How I Learned To Talk About Sex
By Kaleigh Trace
$19.95, paperback, 144 pp.
Invisible Publishing, August 2014

Kaleigh Trace is as fierce as her book, Hot Wet and Shaking: How I Learned To Talk About Sex. As a disabled, queer, sex educator, Trace boldly writes about sex – solo, together, or with a small cast. Trace shamelessly traces bodily negotiations, her personal sexual exploits, abortion, and the bumpy road to adulthood.

 

Adult Onset
By Ann-Marie MacDonald
$22.00, paperback, 400 pp.
Knopf Canada, August 2015

Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Adult Onset is a novel about the inherent complexities of family, complications of motherhood, and love’s undertow. Set in Toronto, Mary Rose MacKinnon is a successful YA author who can quasi-retire in her 40s. She lives with her two kids and partner Hilary, an in-demand theatre director. Mostly, solo parenting while Hilary’s at work, MacKinnon is left at home to combat childcare, her own failing health, and a threatening personal family history.

 

How To Be Alone
By Tanya Davis & Andrea Dorfman
$17.99, hardcover, 128 pp.
Harper Collins, October 2013

Based on the viral video-poem written by Tanya Davis, and filmmaker Andrea Dorfman, How To Be Alone is a book for solo birds. Positioned for times in life when you choose to be alone, rather than lonely, or want to celebrate your solitude. Davis’ gentle words are wise little offerings, and accompanied by Dorfman’s whimsical illustrations, this book honours the aloneness within us all.

 


Photobooth-mockPhotobooth: A Biography
By Meags Fitzgerald
$20.00, paperback, 280 pp.
Conundrum Press, September 2013

Part journalistic, part personal, and slightly historical. Meags Fitzgerald’s Photobooth: A Biography is a graphic non-fiction book that chronicles the history of the photobooth, a century old opportunity to take photos is a timely, and cheap manner. Fitzgerald grapples with her connection to these machines, and questions the future.

What books are you reading for #Pride2015? Tell us in the comments below.

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Still No Word Shannon Webb-Campbell Breakwater BooksThe 2014 winner of The Out-In-Print Literary Award for queer & trans-spectrum, female-identified writers not previously published in book form was Halifax’s Shannon Webb-Campbell and her provocative collection of poems, Still No Word.

My favorite poems here echo the night-sky image of the book’s cover, with lines scattered like constellations across the page inviting readings both as discrete units and as part of the whole poem.

Poems like “Emotional Philosophy” play with form: “I haven’t opened your unpaid bills / I’ve read your old magazines and put your death certificate aside // I haven’t discovered the manuscript in your office. / I’ve made a photocopy”. Some of the antithetical statements ring true but others obviously contradict each other in thoughtful ways.

Still No Word’s poems invite contemplation of, for example, genetics in  “Chromosome Story” – “my parents,/ with everything they know, / hiding in / their living cells” – or commitment in “Because We’re Going to Camp Mockingee” – “your love is Atlantic / resilient and resounding /a place to live by / an essential to life’s raft”, which both alludes to and is reminiscent of fellow Haligonian poet, Sue Goyette.

Webb-Campbell’s simple profundity makes this collection an excellent gift for people you want to start reading poetry.

Still No Word
by Shannon Webb-Campbell
$16.96, paperback, 96 pp.
Breakwater Books, March 2015

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The launch of your first book may be the most terrifying step you ever take. One poet shares her story

No one tells you when you are having your first book published how exposed you’ll feel. Not merely undressed, more like you’ve taken off your skin, and are showing your organs to the world.

There is no What to Expect When You Are Expecting book for authors to toss across the room. No one mentions how you may entertain killing yourself, artfully selecting your means of suicide. Oven. Pills. Gas. Fellow poet friends joke – you’ll sell more books!

No one speaks of the rolling waves of anxiety that come once your book goes to the printers. How you contemplate changing your name, running away to a faraway land, reinventing yourself, taking up a whole new life.

In the months prior to the Unhingedrelease of my first book, Still No Word (Breakwater Books), I became unhinged. My entire body quivered, my hands wouldn’t stop shaking when I spoke. I oscillated from wanting to vomit, to collecting rocks to fill my pockets for my farewell walk into the merciless Atlantic.

I searched for escape routes. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, drink myself blind. I felt ransacked, all the years I’ve spent protecting the most shameful parts of myself, and now I was publishing them in a book. Every writer I confided my hysterics to smiled knowingly, and assured, all of this is normal. I was long taken by vulnerability’s undertow.

One prized poet tried to soothe: all of these feelings are there to help take in the significance of the book when it comes. Though, recalled at the time of his first book in the late 90s, he labored under substance abuse, and couldn’t remember a thing. Let alone any of his feelings around it.

Another owl-eyed writer described the process of publishing as an act of meeting your subterranean self. It’s a brave and strange thing to publish a book, to give your work over to the world. Many artists decide not to continue and go on quietly, secretly working solely for themselves. Then, she offered up the number to a good therapist.

After circling my options, I opted for the geographical cure. I booked a last minute flight to Cuba, a means to breakaway from the endless winter storms inside my head and outside my window. Put an ocean between my book and I. Who cares if I’m sick? Nothing a warm beach couldn’t fix.

Hopped up on cold medicine, I skinny-dipped in the Caribbean Sea, drank mojitos in the sun, read under a thatch umbrella, and hung out with Hemingway’s ghost in Havana. For a week, I became a tropical version, flowers tucked in my hair, speaking in broken Spanish, musing about Neruda and Gabriel Garcias Marquez, and stealing glances with a dimpled stranger – a handsome Cuban named Yosmel.

I let him see parts I kept only for myself – a notebook filled with unpublished poems, all scribbles and broken lines. Nestled in the incubator of someone whose first language wasn’t English, I felt both seen and veiled, basked in a new light. Instead of fear or a critical gaze, I softened. I let the poems be the poems. He already knew I was more than words on the page.

By starlight on a balcony overlooking palm trees, Yosmel spoke of the thousands of Cubans who fled in the night by boats, piled in small dories, braving the high seas in search of their birth right: freedom. Most died at sea, never again to reach land.

RoarI grew quiet, and before he left, tucked a poem in his breast pocket.

Often when we encounter big emotions in life, the first thing to go is our voice. On my last day in Cuba, flying home days before my book launch, I couldn’t speak. After nearly missing my flight, I made it back, but my voice didn’t. Forced to postpone my launch due to weather and illness, and sit in solitude snowstorm by snowstorm, I eventually found solace.

Here I was, a deeply privileged poet, with all the freedom in the world, petrified not only of the weather, the proverbial boat, and the sea, but also of claiming my own work. I made myself so seasick with anxiety I lost all words.

After seven days of fevered dreams, my voice finally broke its silent retreat. It came on less like a whisper, and more of a rumble. I stayed quiet a little longer, and held the thousands of Cubans who tried to escape the confines of their lives, and their farewell view of the azure sea in my heart. People who died fighting for a freedom I nearly threw away.

In the end, I never truly lost my voice, only had to let it rest long enough to realize its strength and worth in the world. The poems and I now roar.

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Still No Word Shannon Webb-Campbell Breakwater Books

Harvest Your Heart

When you arrive at this loneliness write a letter to each lover and examine what was taken. Remind them with memories and pinpoint subtle ways they touched you. Recall the way they buttered your toast and spread your thighs.

Bring them to your tower, where you’ve been hiding since you left them, learning and unlearning, doing and undoing, covering and recovering. Cup your hands over their eyes and linger until anxiety turns to ease, familiarity.

You know the years have worn on them; they’ve worn on you, too.

Give them a moment to adjust, to take in the view. Ask them to bear witness to your shame, a transformation of pain, reclaimed.

Tell them of the centuries you’ve spent grieving. Give them, and yourself, mercy. Apologize before a harvest moon. Set right what can be set right and finally drop what you couldn’t let go of. Hold your own hand, and kiss your palms goodnight.

Love again, this stranger in you. Set a table for two and forget to blow out the candles before bed. Burn down the house and build anew.

 

Other Waves of Thought

these spirits of place
are ancient

you remember landscapes
landscapes
remember you

every view holds memory
all horizons meet the horizon within

quiet mind
quiet body
there is nothing more to this

from this shore to that
avoid rocks, bottom,
high winds and water
it calls lightning to its breast

these rituals
meditations of undoing
all of us breath

 

Tell Me Medicine Woman, Who do I Belong to?

once I was a fatherless daughter
now I come from a landless band
from west coast newfound land
where earth meets coast

I am an Irish-named river
born close to a mountain
married to the ocean
uncertain of my sense of place
now father’s last name echoes
on the wind

I am Qalipu Mi’kmaq
product of the Indian Act
he’s a man of few words
has never built a teepee
shingles suburban houses
only ladder touches ground

I try to sing to you
in Gaelic, English,
French and Mi’kmaw
but don’t know your languages

you were hunter, trapper
healer, and bootlegger
a midwife to seven hundred babies
around Bay of St. Georges

you travelled by dog team
horse, sled, and snowshoes
to expectant mothers
father says you were small,
only four feet tall

you bring gifts –
eagle feathers, rock, tree bark ‒
to remind me of a place
in the possibilities,
woman, you are mighty

Still No Word
by Shannon Webb-Campbell
$16.96, paperback, 96 pp.
Breakwater Books, March 2015