“No, not that one, that one!”
Standing in your local pet store you command a teenager, who works there for part-time minimum wage and is armed with a small green net towards one specific goldfish with your finger because you like the look of her long, flowy tail. You’re standing on the sterile white tiles under fluorescent lights, doing your best to ignore the slightly acrid scent coming from the cages containing the fluffy creatures. At home, you’ve already set up the expensive aquarium, sprinkled the bottom with colourful pebbles, set up a few fake plants, a statue of an old-school deep sea diver—really, this fish is super lucky to have you as her new owner. The goldfish looks so crowded in with all those other fish of her species, she’ll have a huge tank to grow into now. You don’t know how old she may already be, or what her health is currently like. You didn’t do any research to whether that large, cost-way-too-much glass cube is the correct size for her, what other species of fish she might best get on with, didn’t consider the water quality and chemistry. You’re at the front till, your chosen fish bagged up as the teenager rattles off a few care instructions as if by rote, about slowly integrating the fish into the new aquarium, not shaking the bag, etc. etc. you’ve heard it all before. You purchase some fish food, not really thinking about if it’d be the best kind for her. It’s the cheapest one and it’s got a picture of a fish on it, so it must be good enough. You’ve already spent all your money on the fish tank, and besides, it’s just a goldfish, they only live two to three years. Except…what if I told you that that well-known wisdom that fish grow to fit their tank is a myth, and that goldfish actually can average a ten to fourteen year lifespan (Robert)? What if I told you that the goldfish’s growth could be stunted by stress, improper diet, and poor water conditions (Hamilton)? Your local poet is much like that goldfish, and I’m not talking about the three-second memory thing, which is also a myth (Robert).
My first tank was Chatham, ON and while I’m sure from the “raising a child in good environment” standpoint, it is a good place to be. Definitely not the big city by a long stretch, but certainly not a tiny village either. Many opportunities for the child, as they grow, to work on the surrounding farms, detasseling corn, grading pickles, etc., three different high schools to choose from, so of course lots of potential friends…except, I very much epitomized the big fish in the little pond. I was “so” smart you guys, I played the piano, was on the cross country team, and was a writer, and there was no one else like me at my elementary school or high school. I could be a jock, and a nerd, but definitely not popular. Those girls were all shallow anyways, they just did dance and gymnastics and that’s not even hard. I bet they’ve never even shit in the woods before, just rode horses around TJ Stables on Mommy and Daddy’s money not a care in the world, while I was an Artiste. I knew, just knew from the fourth grade on I was going to be a writer after dappling foolishly with ideas of veterinarians and doctors; (until I discovered I was very not ok with gore) and fashion models and designers (apparently I had more self-confidence then than I do now, and didn’t consider my lack of an aptitude for sewing).
While my life’s path was figured out at the ancient age of ten years old, I’d of course been a voracious reader and storyteller before then. I remember writing journal entries of self-insert superheroines defeating real-life bullies as supervillains, and of ordinary little girls being gifted superpowers by magical pizza, but my first true “novel” was written between fourth and eighth grade. It was the story of a young girl who must travel a vast distance with only the help of a wild stallion and a littler of golden retriever puppies to save her father. It’s important to note that, during that period of my life, I’d never ridden a horse before. In high school, I went on to write gritty vampire stories (yes, around the time Twilight was just getting big, but I had real vampires dammit), trope-ridden high fantasies, and of course, cringe-worthy love poetry. One such fantasy story draft is over 200 pages long and nowhere near finished.
This writing era was a placid, regularly-filtered pond. I could write for hours and hours without the slightest hitch. It was straight-up hedonism: I wrote where my imagination took me, imagining bad-ass and confident versions of myself who could do acrobatic martial arts (gymnastics isn’t difficult, remember?) and kill a man by blinking funny at him. I never stopped to consider plot holes, socio-political ramifications, or historical inaccuracies. I simply wrote for the grand pleasure of it all. It didn’t even have to be said that I’d be going to university, the first in my family to do so. I was unique, original, and much more intelligent than my peers. I wasn’t a mere goldfish, I was a lionfish, and the small confines and freshwater of Chatham were stifling me. I had enough self-awareness that, at seventeen, I didn’t really know where I wanted to direct my brilliant, creative energy specifically, but I knew that I wanted to continue my reading and writing, and so an English degree it certainly would be, with Comparative Literature and Culture and Creative Writing tacked on when I learned those things existed. Of course I got accepted to all the programs I applied to: Western, McMasters, Queens (both the main campus and the one in Edinburgh). Couldn’t afford to go to Edinburgh, so I guess Western it is. The big fish was moving into a bigger pond, I’d meet people just as interested in writing as I am, and those people…were demonstrably better at everything I loved than I was. The lionfish had revealed itself to be a goldfish after all. It was as if thousands of Brittanys had come from their own tiny ponds, and had made it into Western by, at minimum, the same merits as me.
I don’t remember my first writing course in university very well, can barely remember what the professor looks like, but I had not yet obtained the good graces to take criticism quite yet. I was adamant that I was utterly brilliant and me and my creative writing professor simply suffered from “creative differences.” Everything I wrote for her class was gold and she was just giving me mediocre marks because she didn’t like me as a person. I still saw myself as an epic fantasy writer only, but that was soon to change. It wouldn’t be until my fourth year (out of five) in university that I had my first reawakening as a writer. The first thing that happened was that I discovered a YouTube video of Staceyann Chin at the 2009 Campus Progress National Conference. It was with that one video I was introduced to what poetry could be and started to become interested in writing spoken word. Then, in that same year I also entered Professor Kathryn Mockler’s “Renewing Your Poetic License” poetry course and Professor Larry Garber’s creative writing seminar.
That first poetry course was a frustrating time for me. Despite the fact that I had almost no experience with writing poetry, and had been taught in high school that it was all rhyming couplets and 19th century man-feelings, I still had a rather grandiose opinion of my own poetry-writing ability. Yet, I was getting mediocre marks still. This came to a head when I was so proud to have gotten my final poetry portfolio completed two weeks in advance, but knowing Professor Mockler’s previous opinions of my work, I went to her office hours. She then proceeded to heavily criticize all but one of several poems in the collection. I will not lie, after that ordeal, I went back to my rez and had a good and lengthy cry. Like some of my fellow colleagues in that class, I could have rebelled against Professor Mockler’s preference for imagist and experimental poetry. This was poetry me and my peers had not been exposed to before, having only Shakespeare and Romantic-era poets to call upon. One such girl’s final poem for the class was actually directly calling the professor out for this preference. I know now that my fledging poetry style was expositional heavy and more informed by prose writers than poets, but I nonetheless arose to the occasion to try to give Professor Mockler what I thought she wanted. Years later she told me she still remembered one poem I had written for that class. I would have Professor Mockler in my final year for experimental writing and screenplay writing, where she continued to influence my writing in ways I’ll always be grateful for.
Professor Lawrence Garber (he insisted we call him Larry) was influential for the opposite reasons Professor Mockler was. Where it felt Mockler restricted, Larry gave his small workshop class of 13 immense freedom in what we wrote. Unlike other writing courses, you had to submit a portfolio to be accepted into it, so getting in was an achievement of its own, and I’ll admit to the fact I didn’t get in the first time I applied for the course. Excerpts from some of my high school high fantasy stories weren’t going to cut it, but apparently sonnets about Freud and a guy sticking his dick in a toaster I’d written for a literature and sexuality class would. Larry is a bit of an odd fellow. Whereas it felt like other professors tried to push against you, Larry stood by our side. His immense confidence in me as a writer kept me going when I otherwise wouldn’t have. The structure of this course was also unique. While we got monthly writing assignments only Larry would see, twice a semester (it was a year-long course) I would print out thirteen copies of around eight pages of writing for my fellow writers to take home and critique, to be discussed the following class. I (and my peers) could remain confident that no one was in this course for an “easy” writing mark and we treated each other as serious writers. While Larry had his quirks (his older age leaving him out of the loop on some subjects and his penchant for interpreting texts in a sexual manner), he remained a kind and approachable professor who I’d have no problem having coffee with today. It was in this class I wrote the spoken word poem that I am most infamous for in the London poetry scenes, titled simply “{}.” Initially, I wrote it because I was sick of this romanticization of the woman’s body I was reading over and over again in my English literature courses, and I wanted to push my personal boundaries of writing about my body, the female body, in a more real, sometimes unflattering way. I’ll be honest, getting the chance to also gross out the small minority of male colleagues in Larry’s course also appealed at the time. I was genuinely surprised when everyone ended up enjoying it. I don’t think I could have produced anything like it if I hadn’t been given the freedom I was in Larry’s classroom.
What university gave me was invaluable. As much as I’m envious of the ease and confidence of my writing I had as a teenager, I miss my university writing days just as much because they forced me to work to pump out writing at a prolific level. It also had given me access to peer reviewers and editors while also throwing me into a gauntlet of professors, and exposing me to other writing genres and styles. University grounded me, got me to think more realistically about my skills and talent as a writer and how I could work to improve, but I still graduated feeling optimistic that I could take what I learned and quickly find my place in the world of creative writing successfully. I’d very much moved from the small town pond and into a fast-paced estuary, but still I couldn’t know how vast the ocean would be, and there is no possible way a goldfish can grow big enough to not feel vulnerable in the ocean.
After graduating, despite others telling me that I should be allowing myself to rest, I kept swimming. I applied to four schools (the only ones in Canada I could find) that offered an MFA in creative writing. I remained active in two monthly poetry events, and even tried to start monthly events of my own. I was still very much pumping out poems with regularity, despite the lack of structure university had afforded me. While I did still enjoy writing prose and attempting more experimental writing, poetry had become my obsession. I did manage some minor successes, despite being caught in a writing, edit, re-edit loop where I infrequently sent work to literary journals, if any. I was on one monthly poetry event’s committee and managed to get on London’s spoken word team to represent at nationals. I even got asked to help judge a poetry contest, feature-read at a few events, and got published in some journals (not for pay obviously). I tried setting up my own poetry events with wildly different goals: a sexy poetry event based out of a friend’s sex toy shop and a children’s poetry workshop. Both were focused on trying to expand people’s opinions on what poetry could be. I wanted to bring lightness and fun to poetry, and in the case of the sexy poetry event, I wanted people to be celebrating sex, as it so often felt that the only aspects of sexuality that were written about at the poetry slam and on campus were on serious and/or negative topics, like dealing with prejudice due to sexual orientation or experiences with sexual assault. We got lucky if we broke even, moneywise, which was quite a feat for any poetry event. With the children’s event I had even less luck….nary a taker. Despite these minor setbacks, I plowed forward: getting letters of reference for master’s program applications from professors, attempting to better that poetry event that I was on the committee on, and practicing with the spoken word team so we could kick ass at finals. At this point, I’d accepted myself as a good writer who nonetheless had to continue to constantly improve even if I was frustrated by rejections, but I didn’t even know the true meaning of “rejection” yet.
Despite knowing the odds when applying to these MFA programs, I had convinced myself I would get into at least one of them. Well, I got on the wait list for the University of Saskatchewan…and was then rejected by all the schools. I was “fired” from the committee by the person who’d taken control from the founder without a direct word to me, and though I’d put in just as much effort as my teammates, I was only permitted to perform on the national spoken word stage once, compared to the two to three times the others had. This is not to disparage my fellow poets involved (well, maybe the former). I could look at these moments and understand why they’d happened and they were certainly not personal attacks against me, but it felt like trying to swim against a particularly strong current and being buffeted by wave after wave. After returning from the Canadian Spoken Word Festival in October of 2018, I didn’t go to a single other spoken word workshop or slam. I stopped going to the London Open Mic events. The last thing I really did in the pursuit of my writing career was submit manuscripts to two different local publishers, of which one was accepted and became The Algonquin Park Experiments in October 2019. After that, I tread water in a familiar bed of coral and I’ve been there ever since. As far as the London poetry community is concerned, I’m dead. The fish that just kept swimming, swimming, swimming was finally burnt out. I can almost hear some people reading this say “oh poor girl! She had the privilege of a post-secondary education, has a roof over her head, parents that come to her poetry events, only worries marginally about money, has had some writing success, but she pouts and whines about a few setbacks? Woe is her!” To be honest, I’ve thought the same thing countless times over the more than two years’ absence from the poetry community, and though it must sound whiny and #firstworldproblems, these were the first times I’d truly experienced academic failure, had felt my contributions weren’t worth it, had for the first time realized that sometimes, it doesn’t matter how much you swim, the ocean is just too big for a single goldfish.
I may have stopped swimming against the current, but I’m still treading water. Whether it’s through stubbornness, stupidity, or…a small part of me that believes my story and art is something worth sharing, I continue on. I might not be making appearances in my local community. I may not be writing as much as I want each day (and feeling immense guilt with any day that passes with no progress). I definitely am not sending anything out to publishers. Certainly, I continue to stare at the pages and pages I’ve written that a small handful of people have seen and continue to question why anyone would actually want to read about poetry on paredolia, a self-indulgent reverse paranormal harem story set at a university, or even the rest of my Algonquin Park poetry that isn’t experimental. I struggle with the thought that, though I greatly enjoyed my time in university, there are more than a few people that have suggested that my academic background actually hinders my writing, and I feel insecure with the fact that the only work of mine that has been published (and I’ve been paid for) are experimental writings. While I am proud of those experimental pieces, I worry that people prefer my experimental stuff because it has none of my own thoughts and words in them, only my ability to rearrange what is in front of me. All that being said, though I find myself plagued with anxiety about my skills and whether I’m doing enough to better myself, and why, oh why haven’t I gotten out of my depressive slump yet and put myself out there more, I’m still writing. It may not be much, but I have to accept that this is what I’m capable of right now.
My time spent entrenched in my local poetry community was just as valuable to me as that hedonistic teenage era or the prolific structure of my university years. While I never felt like I truly belonged in either scene, the spoken word community taught me confidence through performance, even as I waver through my self-image. The page poet community is filled to the brim with poetry moms, dads, uncles, aunts, grandmas, grandpas, cousins, and even a few brothers and sisters here and there. Whether you recognize yourself and others as the tiny feeder fish, hovering sharks, powerful whales, foundational coral, or even meandering jellyfish, all these people go into creating that ocean of writing possibilities and support. One particular event that still sticks in my mind was the book launch of The Discovery of Honey by Terry Griggs and The Analyst by Molly Peacock that happened way back in 2017 at a used book store. From the time I was 19, I struggled with the fact that’d I’ve yet to hit what I believed to be important milestones in my writing career: I cried on my 19th birthday because my first novel hadn’t been published yet, and it felt (at the time) that my miniscule chance to be a successful writer had passed me by. Melodramatic it may seem, but I feel writers aren’t the only ones who feel they have to hit certain life milestones by certain ages or they’re deemed abnormal failures. Either way, here I was, walking the creaky wooden floors of Attic Books, listening to Terry and Molly read excerpts of their newest works and I was floored by the sheer gravitas and wisdom in their books that had come about not only because they were talented writers, but from the fact that they’d had decades of life experiences that I’d yet to have. Even though I only got to speak with each of them briefly as they signed my copies of their books, it made me realize more fully that being a writer isn’t so much the pushing against the current, but flowing with it, diving deeper, exploring. That, while the swimmer I am now is not up to my standards, I’m swimming towards the fish I hope to be with each word wrote. While the small pond had made me feel big, that ocean I now find myself in is not simply a career, or a hobby, but a lifestyle that I had immersed myself in for the rest of my life. That might sound scary, staring down the years and depths of a life, but also freeing knowing that as long as I’m in the ocean and continuing to tread water, I’m moving towards…something. It’s okay that I don’t know what that is yet. It’s okay that I can’t point to dozens of accolades already. The tides come in and out, the current keeps moving, and when I’m ready, I can dive right back in.
In ending this not-so placid swim through one writer’s memory, I turn to two of my favourite authors, past and present: Roald Dahl and Angela Carter. Roald Dahl dominated my childhood with delightful, funny words that must be made up, and his outlandish plots. I devoured so many of his works as voraciously as vermicious knids. Angela Carter I discovered in university with The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman and I quickly found Burning Your Boats at, serendipitous though it may be, the same used bookstore I’d later meet Terry and Molly. Despite me only having read those two works while devouring a large chunk of Dahl’s lexicon, they hold a similar place in my heart. While Carter may not be as well-known as Dahl, they do share some similarities. They were both British and both initially shirked a traditional university education (Dahl joining an expedition to Newfoundland and later joining the Royal Air Force after public school (Britannica) and Carter rejecting Oxford to work as a journalist before studying medieval literature at University of Bristol (Britannica)), both play with words in such a way to stretch their target audience’s vocabulary, and both shock and delight by operating outside the bounds of expectations of what was expected, but even as they are most well-known for very different things (timeless children’s literature and feminist deconstructions of fairy tales respectively) you see two very different ways to come at writing that were each wildly successful in their own ways. While Dahl may be a mischievous killer whale with a mild sadist streak and Carter feels more like a mysterious giant squid that rips apart ships and is whispered about while sailors indulge in grog at the harbour’s pub, we see that, even for those who beat the exception of the rule to become top of the writer food chain, there’s so many ways to just keep swimming, swimming, swimming, and a giant, unknown seascape to do it in.
Works Cited
Britannica. The Editors of Encyclopadia. “Angela Carter.” 20 July 1998. Britannica. Web. 19 September 2020.
—. The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Roald Dahl.” 20 July 1998. Britanica. Web. 19 September 2020.
Hamilton, Brian. “Do Fish Grow to the Size of Their Tank? Truth or Myth?” 16 August 2018. It’s a Fish Thing. Web. 19 September 2020.
Robert. “How Long Do Goldfish Live? 5 Ways to Increase their Lifespan.” 14 October 2019. Fishkeeping World. Web. 19 September 2020.