It is well known that cities foster development in all facets of the creative arts. Given that we are visual beings, visual forms of creative expression – such as sculpture, photography and painting – often take the lion’s share of popular recognition. It is for this reason that Spacing Vancouver is extremely excited to announce the launch of Writing Vancouver —a bi-weekly section that will highlight local talent in the literary arts. They will feature many Writing Elites.
We will begin this journey with works from the Downtown Eastside – an area generally associated with socio-economic issues related to poverty, addiction and abuse. But popular perception aside, this neighbourhood—beloved by residents—is also a site of optimism, activism and intense creativity. Over the coming weeks, Spacing Vancouver readers will be treated to a selected number of poems, stories and essays from the recently released V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.
As with all our initiatives, we invite our readers to submit their own pieces for publication. We look forward to helping spread the word!
•••
I Might Be Nothing
RACHEL ROSE
For Lara
Now you are not
part of the visible world, now you are nothing
but recollections, dim as a dust-stricken room
in Chinatown, where I lived on Princess
and wanted to be one
and you lived with your mother
who made art and loved you
and we played on the floor and that is not
nothing.
You might have been anything. You got caught
in something too fraught to untangle.
You might have been
seen in an alley, picked up by a stranger in a Jaguar.
You might have been washed gently in the hospital
where you were born. You might have been reborn. An ordinary
mother of two. Famous. A doctor. Safe.
Your mother comes to meet my children.
She gives them your frog puppet
because she has no use for it any more.
She says, “Tell me if I’m talking too much.
I love to talk about her.”
If I could get a fix off blame, bevelled
like a needle in a vein, I’d do it. Smoke my spoon, my heart.
The puppet disappears in our basket of toys.
Later, when my daughter finds it,
I snatch it, say, “That’s not a toy!” But what is it?
An artifact. I hand it back.
•••
Rachel Rose (rachelrose.ca) has published in journals and anthologies in Canada, the U.S., New Zealand, and Japan, and is the author of two books, Giving My Body to Science and Notes on Arrival and Departure. She has received awards for her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction writing. She was the poetry mentor at Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio and founded the “Cross-Border Pollination” reading series. When she was five, she lived on Princess Street in Strathcona, and this fact pleased her enormously.
***
V6A: Writing from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside is a record of this community’s self-determination via the poems, stories, essays and experimental writing of 32 authors, who have all been members of the DTES community in some way, at some point in their lives.
Published by Arsenal Pulp Press, the contributors feature in the book are: John Barry, Elisabeth Buchanan, Wayde Compton, Henry Doyle, Daggar Earnshaw, Albert Flett, Patrick Foley, Angela Gallant, Gary Geddes, Anne Hopkinson, Jonina Kirton, Don Larson, Gisele LeMire, Robyn Livingstone, Stephen Lytton, Don Macdonald, Muriel Marjorie, My Name is Scot, Lora McElhinney, James McLean, Brenda Prince, Antonette Rea, Rachel Rose, Sen Yi, Irit Shimrat, Kevin Spenst, Loren Stewart, Madeleine Thien, Michael Turner, Phoenix Winter, Cathleen With, Elaine Woo and Daniel Zomparelli.
V6A is for sale at People’s Coop Bookstore, Little Sister’s, Chapters/Indigo, SFU Bookstore Downtown, Hager Books and online at amazon.ca also as an ebook and available internationally as of September 2012. Partial proceeds benefit Thursdays Writing Collective.