David Williamson

Through Disassembled Houses of Perfect Stones

Abstract

Through disassembled houses of perfect stones: a ten poem reading on fading boundaries of ontology, territory and family.

In Writing in the Oral Tradition, Gerald Vizenor tells us, “words are in the air, in our blood… in the fish and animals where they have been since we first came to this place…” As such, writing poetry becomes a ceremony of self-creation and self-determination but it is not fabrication or fiction. It is part-discovery, part-cartography: poetry, as the crow flies.

In a ten poem the poet explores concepts of placed people as a reflection on a twenty five year career as a settler-educator exclusively in an Indigenous community. Eventually marrying into the community and becoming a father, the poet navigates cultural and territorial relationships of mixed heritage and history. Leaving settled farmland and grounded on the shores of the Nelson River in a fishing and trapping community, ideas of privilege and cultural minorities are explored, challenged and reframed in verse which reconciles as much as it challenges.

Bio

David Yerex Williamson is a college administrator, instructor and poet living in the northern Manitoba community of Kinasao Sipi (Norway House, Treaty 5). His recent works have appeared in Prairie Fire, The New Quarterly, Prairie Journal of Literature, Heartwood, a League of Canadian Poets anthology in honour of our relationship with trees and, most recently, Sweet Water: poems for the water sheds. When not teaching, writing or drawing, David shovels snow, cuts wood and chases his dogs along the historic Nelson River.

Sarah Ens

Flyway: Tracking Ideas of Home

Abstract

My creative thesis, Flyway, is a long-poem articulation of home set within the Canadian landscape and told through the lens of forced migration and its corollary of trauma. Tracing the trajectory of the Russian Mennonite diaspora, Flyway examines how intergenerational upheaval generates anxieties of place which are mirrored in the human-disrupted migratory patterns of the natural world. Drawing from the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, from my roots as a third-generation Mennonite immigrant, from eco-poetics, and from ecological research into the impact of climate change on the endangered landscape of Manitoba’s tallgrass prairie, Flyway migrates along geographical, psychological, and affective routes in an attempt to understand complexities of home. As we face the watershed moment of climate crisis, Flyway suggests that, in the midst of massive upheaval and migration, we might use story to process individual, collective, and ecological trauma so that we might reclaim identity, cultivate community, and reconnect to land.

Bio

Sarah Ens is a writer and editor based in Treaty 6 territory. Her writing has appeared in literary journals such as Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry Magazine, Contemporary Verse 2, and Poetry Is Dead. In 2019, she won The New Quarterly's Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Her debut collection of poetry, The World Is Mostly Sky, came out this spring with Turnstone Press. She is currently completing her MFA in Writing at the University of Saskatchewan.

Conrad Scott

Navigating Waterline Immersion

Abstract

This talk for the ALECC 2020 theme on “watershed” is a mixed discussion about and creative reading of my recent book of poetry, Waterline Immersion (Frontenac House 2019). The book seems tailor-made for the conference theme, as it weaves together my genealogical lines in the locale where I was born while also exploring the sense of place at the meeting of the North and South Thompson rivers in what is now referred to as Kamloops, British Columbia. Threading together the Norse creation / destruction myth, colonial Contact with North America, river valley history, geological processes, the cycle of mortality, ancestral charts, and personal stories, Waterline Immersion asks the fundamental question of what it means to understand a place— framing the resulting conversation through a lens that also asks us to reconsider how we understand the landscape and waterways. Though, in Norse mythology, Odin and his brothers slew the first being to come into existence (their ancestor, Ymir) and thus created the land, ocean, and water, this book works to reclaim these environmental aspects from the trespasses of the modern world and resurrect the ice giant Ymir as a voice in the narrative. Thus the land, waters, and sky arise and give some perspective on what has been called the Anthropocene. In the end, we are asked to become silent and listen together; we are asked to meditate on how entangled life and elements of this place came together and then will move on with the river.

Bio

Conrad Scott is an alumnus of the 2010 Spring Writing Studio at the Banff Centre for the Arts. Waterline Immersion, his first poetry collection, was published by Frontenac House Press in 2019, and his poetry has appeared in such publications as Freefall Magazine and The Enpipe Line. Dr. Scott’s academic work contemplates the environmentally troubling present through dystopian imaginings of the future, and considers the remnants of our places and cultures in those futuristic settings. His creative work takes a step to the side and urges us to look askance at our society and our sense of place in the world. He is currently working on a second poetry collection and a novel set in the future.

Discussion