My essay is titled It’s Like Telling People You Have Rats and Forgetting to Qualify Them as Pets: A Poet’s Journey and you will find it on page 187.

ABSTRACT
How do I take my place as a learner, parent, educator in the fractal, multifaceted, kaleidoscopic process of being and becoming? How to negotiate the forces that pull us and push us in different directions? Or, how I discovered I am a poet, and survived to tell of it.

You can read it electronically in a PDF version or you can also have a print copy if you wish.
I thank the editors Mary Stewart and Lynn Butler-Kisber for including this essay in their journal. Also thank you to the peer-reviewers for their kind comments.

Hope you enjoy it. Feel free to let me know what it stirs.

Usually, my husband is the one that does the pumpkin carving with the kids and the trick or treating. He doesn’t mind. So I can avoid it mostly, and not worry too much about it. Other than when the time comes to get rid of the rotten pumpkins from my porch. Some of the people I know have also expressed their issues with it. Let’s say they tolerate it.

This year Dethe is travelling, so the quietly simmering crises for meaning (that I mostly keep subdued on the surface) boils over. I will confess, I did not buy pumpkins for carving. I just could not make myself. If lit carved pumpkins are what we need to remember the dead, isn’t it ironic when there are people dying of hunger in the world? Is it not an indulgence putting out a lot of waste?

What does Halloween do for you? I would love to know. What is it a metaphor for? I did not grow up with Hallowe’en. To buy into it I have to really be convinced of the non-commercial “value” of it. I am shopping around for a more sustainable ritual, a ritual that has a lot more spiritual benefit than the waste put out in its name. What happens to the way we grow pumpkins, when we know that most of them will be wasted? Are we growing nutritious pumpkins? Or are we just growing them for the size and the look, not for the taste?

My friend Robin had a photo published on qarrtsiluni titled The Names of the Dead are Floating to Heaven which offers another way of remembering the dead. It is that photo and memories of how my grandmother remembered by lighting a candle, that helped the simmering boil over. I am trying to make this joyful, honestly. But it seems being honest is more precious for me at this time.

Perhaps I am thinking too much. Perhaps I should get more into the spirit of things? Well, that is exactly what I was going for, more for the spirit of things. Perhaps we are living in a world where we probably should start thinking harder. And question what we do and what we know with more vigour. Who benefits the most from our Halloween extravaganza?

So this Halloween, I am not going with the flow, well not entirely. I will perhaps visit the cemetery. Take a flower to a grave. Anyone’s grave. Maybe I will write a poem. I have already made delicious pumpkin pie, from scratch. Including the crusts.

And of course will assist my kids with dress up. Whip up the whipping cream. And then I will have to figure out what to do with all the candy they bring home.

The book Poetic Inquiry: Vibrant Voices in the Social Sciences is out. I have about a dozen poems in it and I cannot wait to see how they turned out on the page, since in one of the proofs all the page breaks were gone, which was quite unsettling. Hope to receive my copy soon. I hear the book is on sale at Amazon Canada, 42% off the regular price. I am sure that will be welcome for those of us students who are on a tight budget.

And now for the quote of the day:
My friend Rob sent me this quote a while back. And I have not been able to get it out of my head. So I thought I would post it here.

“Metaphor is the mind’s opposable thumb” —Cynthia Ozick

I also had this urge for a few minutes to launch into a meditation on hair as metaphor, a perfect moment for this post, but but … my head has been wrapped around submissions, submissions, submissions. A good substitute for Spring cleaning. So that may have to wait.

They have also the young writers’ program which my daughter took on as a challenge a couple of years ago, when she was 10 or so. I am not sure if she finished the novel (almost did, but the ending was giving her some trouble), but she did a lot, and that got her going on a “better” one. The one thing she did not agree with was going for quantity instead of quality. Yet, it may be almost impossible to get her to do that writing for school. Why?

“In our day the intensification of consciousness, in the form of techniques of meditation and the like, has become heavy industry. I have been somewhat puzzled by the extent to which this activity overlooks or evades the fact that all intensified language sooner or later turns metaphorical, and that literature is not only the obvious but the inescapable guide to higher journeys of consciousness.” —Northrop Frye

(from Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature)

What is wrong with the way we teach literature, and I would say especially poetry, that puts people off it for life, and they may not read a book for the rest of their life after they leave school?

Is it because we are so concerned with the form that we forget the essence, the passion that gets people writing in the first place? The need to say something before getting passionate about how we say it? After all, a tool is only useful and appealing when we can see what it can do for us. Even such a basic thing as handwriting that is explicitly taught in school, is important as a means to express oneself clearly, not as an end to be pursued, in itself.

Just wondering if the institutionalized public school tentacled monstrocity we have created is becoming its own worst enemy? How to re-evaluate? How to stop the grind of such huge bureaucracies that turn blind just from their sheer size. And affect the lives of both teachers and students? Let alone lack of shared vision? Is there only one way to dance?

Children are not bored. We teach them to be.

Michael Yahgulanaas is the father of Haida Manga, which re-frames traditional Haida images by adapting them into Japanese manga-styled stories. His style denotes his propensity to “play the edge between the neighbourhoods,” a talent he learned growing up as a light-haired, green-eyed kid in a Haida community. True to that duality, his work expresses his social and environmental concerns with a “trickster-like sense of humour” (The Georgia Straight).

At the bottom of the page in the above link you can see the four panels bearing the letters of re-me-mb-er. I found it quite interesting how he used the text and the image to speak about narrative, community, memory.

Here is a story he illustrated and is up on You-Tube. For more of his art, and info about him you can visit his website. See what he does with the hoods of cars. Or a whole car. He is a trickster. Playful, messing around with our status symbols. Not to mention de-romanticizing the indigenous art that we find comfortable and like to view only in a certain way. Those totem poles, in the myst. I also love the fact that the decades he has spend in political activity are informing his art and making powerful statements both about culture, and environment. And again that playfulness, that messing around. My type of intervention.

I loved the part where he talked about meaning. Finding meaning. Any meaning. This made me think of the poem and how for too long we have insisted in school that a poem has a fixed meaning, that the black cat is symbolic of this or that. I found that approach off putting because I really liked the black cat poem, and I did not really want the meaning the teacher was giving me. I find this blinds us to the possibilities of what it could mean now, this moment, to the people who are willing to look for meaning. For too long we have been held prisoners of such meanings, to the point where we have become uninvolved, apathetic, alienated. Where the hierarchies of those that have the meaning and those who do not have the meaning are reinforced.

I liked this idea of making meaning anew, and building communities around the meanings we make.