Review: Shalan Joudry’s Generations Re-Merging

Gaspereau Press 2014

Generations Re-Merging, Shalan Joudry’s debut book of poetry, takes readers on a “journey through a thick terrain” (9). Through the lens of nature Joudry explores complex issues facing the contemporary Mi’kmaw community. This book creates a model for understanding past injustices that have led to the current issues her cultures face.

        Although keyed to Joudry’s identity as a Mi’kmaw woman, this project evokes the work of other Atlantic Canadian poets like Tonja Gunvaldsen-Klaasen and Don McKay; the concept of "home" is central to all three. Don McKay notes in his essay Baler Twine, “Home, we may say, is the action of the inner life finding outer form; it is the settling of self into the world…To make a home is to establish identity with a primordial grasp.” Like McKay, “home” for Joudry is not as simple as four walls and roof. Rather, it is an identity formed through community and location, and when these are stripped away, so too is one’s sense of self.

            In the poem “Fabrics of the Land,” the places known so intimately by previous generations—who through that land re-newed themselves—have been turned into something unknowable:

                        … community buildings

            a new gas bar for economy

            a school sized up for autonomy

            a house for someone who has waited

            their share of poverty (53)

The poems “Geology of Houses” and “Where Wild Things Grow” demonstrate that without the homes of their ancestors, the Mi’kmaw people survive in insufficient and unnatural housing. For example "Geology of Houses" discusses how a structure can cut people off from both land and  community:

                        …keep me apart

            from all things earthy lustred

            i’m holding out

            holding in the steady vision

            glacially patient

            to live in something raw and weathered

            at least something more alive than this (24)

            Joudry’s intermittent use of words from the Mi’kmaw language parallels the healing she trusts can be brought about by reconnecting with nature, ceremony and community—all of which will lead to reclaiming the identity and culture of the Mi’kmaw.

            Despite some minor lapses in clarity, Joudry’s book works wonderfully as a whole. In the prologue, she urges readers:

However we get lost along the way, let us

rejoice in the healing steps that follow.

I hope we all continue to gather at the edge

of the woods where the generations

before us and after us

re-merge. (9)

           Generations Re-Merging demonstrates that Joudry is a true wordsmith, painting vivid pictures of both the natural and unnatural world in her search
        to know that beauty does not live without horror 
        and to be certain that in the waking edge of rage
        we are still beautiful 
        wild and with a special grace. (27)

Joudry, Shalan. Generations Re-Merging. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2014.

McKay, Don. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home and Nature Poetry.” Vis a Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness. Wolfville: Gaspereau Press, 2001. 23-24.

--by Sharisse LeBrun, with input from Molly Strickland, Monica Grasse and Ben Lord.

Leaving Impressions

I've always liked writing. Ever since I was a little girl, I loved to write. Even if I wasn't writing, I was coming up with ideas and telling people about them. Part of it was because I liked (and still like to) be the center of attention, but another reason is because I want to change the world with my ideas. Perhaps not in a huge way, but in a I've-made-your-day-better sort of way.

For class, the article I chose to read was titled The Girl with the Ribboned Pigtails. The title really stuck out to me and was enough of a reason for me to read it. I thought it was going to be more about the impression that this little girl left on our author, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and how this little girl then influenced her to write. Rather, Shauna met this young girl with ribboned pigtails and was left to ponder how easily people now-a-days can become published.

That's what's to gain from this article as a writer in the 'real world.' Now that we have access to the Internet as well as everyone trying to make it big through the world of publications, she hopes that this girl with ribboned pigtails will continue to write, possibly get published, and make a living through the means of writing.

Those who write should write because they like to write. They should try to get published because they want to get published and feel as though their work is good enough. They shouldn't write "Only when [they] son't have anything more important to do." Writing is important. That's what's to be learned from this. Writing is the centre of our world and needs to be taking seriously.

Sean Michaels in a Creative Writing classroom

Sean Michaels doesn’t carry himself like A Great Writer. I doubt he ever will, despite a writing life earmarked by incrementally greater achievements.

            One Friday in January of 2015, he generously explained to students of Creative Writing Strategies the process that resulted in Us Conductors, his first published novel and the 2014 Scotiabank-Giller prize winner. From a life choc-a-bloc with familiar opportunities and idiocies, he picked out key choices – most deliberate, but others that just happened along – which helped transform his public self from high-school lit-geek, through renowned blogger, to literary superhero. It was a typical list, told with atypical panache, and included:

• starting the music blog “Said the Gramophone” with friends while he was still in his teens.
• after a degree from McGill, deciding to work as a legal assistant, as a job that paid all right, but that he could leave behind at the office each day. A portable job; he worked in Edinburgh for a while.
• six years writing a novel.
• his blog getting the attention of editors at The Guardian; they hired him to do tiny, daily blurbs about the North American music scene. He quit the legal-clerical trade.
• finding the right agent – not too new, not too successful – by combing through the listings on Publishers’ Marketplace. 
•  re-editing the MS with her.
• her Sisyphean efforts to find that book a home, over months and months – the big US presses, the little ones, the big Canadian presses, the little ones.
• putting that MS in a drawer.
• watershed moment: deciding to start the next book, even though he’d just shelved an MS that represented seven-years’ labour without return.
• writing the next MS.
• sending it to his agent. This time they started in Canada, and several big presses were interested.
• negotiating a largish advance, for the current Canadian market. (Still,  it broke down to something just over $5000 per annum for the years that he wrote it, not including the time spent learning his craft with the first MS.)
• editing, again, some more. With his agent, with his workshop group, with the big Canadian press, and with the little American one. At one point there were six people giving him feedback on the MS.
• publication!
• and now, the Scotiabank-Giller. When we saw him, he was on his third week of not having to write for The Guardian.

It doesn’t make sense, does it? It’s a tale of luck and exploitation of luck, and hard work and no reasonable expectation of return. But it put Us Conductors in our hands.

Review: El Jones' "Live From the Afrikan Resistance!"

El Jones explodes into the scene of written poetry with her first book, Live From the Afrikan Resistance! (Roseway, 2014), with passion, intelligence, and scorching honesty. Working from past to present, Jones’ book portrays her constant drive to reinforce the connection she sees between poetry and social justice, evoking the activist poetry of Ntozake Shange and Milton Acorn. Poems like “Mandela” and “Grandmother Zilla” pay homage to the struggles of the past and honour those who came before her; poems like “It Can Be Done” demonstrate how those struggles persist into the present and urge readers to continue the work.

In “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World”, Stephen Slemon explains how “resistance itself is […] never purely resistance, never simply there in the text or the interpretive community, but is always necessarily complicit in the apparatus it seeks to transgress”. Jones’ poems show how one writes successful resistance poetry; as she navigates within societal apparatuses while pointing out their inequalities and failures. Live From the Afrikan Resistance! presents sharp commentary on the injustices that spring from ages of institutionalized racism and classism, as in the poem “Boxes” when she comments that “They are boxing us up,/ Boxing us out,/ And boxing us in” (90).

 Jones’ poems do not shy away from harsh truths. In “Kings and Queens” she states, “We’re all up in each other’s business but we can’t get up in each other’s businesses/ And then we wonder why we still don’t own shit?” (54). She constantly pairs such commentary with calls to action for social responsibility, as is brilliantly showcased by poems like “If You Done Shit”.  This pairing also demonstrates one of the main srengths of Jones’ abilities; her poetry appeals to anyone who reads it. While the book is written primarily to reach the audience of her communities and those who experience the same injustices she does, it simultaneously educates anyone who picks it up. Her accessible language reflects a desire to connect to multiple audiences. Jones’ poetry also ties global issues to her Atlantic Canadian roots, naming local culture heroes like Rocky Jones and Viola Desmond. It moves readers to understand the reality of what it is to be Black in Atlantic Canada, but also to understand the potential and actual sense of community that this identity brings. This book is about community itself, reading more as a loving collaboration than as a singular effort. The energetic, intelligent, and masterful technical wordplay of Live from the Afrikan Resistance! reflects Jones’ usual medium of spoken word, and readers can see how her work was translated from performance to the page. Her words more than survive the journey. 

Review by Molly Strickland
with input from Monica Grasse, Sharisse LeBrun and Ben Lord.