I live in a Northern Ontario town called Sudbury. When
I was poet laureate here a few years ago, every time I travelled to read in
places like Windsor, Toronto, or Ottawa, I found that I had to explain what my
hometown was not. As a laureate, you write poems and read them in other
places, and you are a bit of an ambassador for the place where you live. You
celebrate it. I often found myself patiently explaining what Sudbury was not.
It was not just a moonscape where the NASA astronauts trained in the 1960s. It
was not just a hick town without an artistic, literary, and cultural scene. It
was not just a mining town, even though that’s how it started over a hundred
years ago. What it is seems so much more interesting to me these days.
What it is, to me, is a place where I can go out into
the bush to hike or snowshoe, depending on the season. It’s a place where I can
see an eagle’s nest, or find myself brushing up against a silvery fish when I
go swimming at dawn in nearby lakes. It’s a landscape that is both beautiful
and raw, that challenges and rewards us if we open ourselves to being in
nature. Now, these days, my hometown boasts three post-secondary institutions,
including schools of medicine and architecture. It hosts an annual literary
festival called Wordstock, and there’s even a relatively new small press that
publishes Northern Ontario writers called Latitude 46. There’s a writers’
guild, a symphony, an art gallery, a professional theatre centre, and a lively
farmers’ market that encourages Sudburians to buy locally grown food from our
Northern farmers. There are funky coffee shops, restaurants, bakeries, and yoga
studios, and there are poets, painters, playwrights, singer-songwriters,
actors, novelists, and sculptors who live up here. There are also a couple of vibrant
music festivals to be had, namely the Northern Lights Festival Boreal and the
Jazz Sudbury Festival. The relative newbie on the block, the Up Here Festival,
includes music, but also has a key focus on new murals being painted throughout
the downtown core.
My hometown is not what it used to be. It has grown up
and evolved. It will always, though, still ‘live’ above the labyrinths of the
mines. We just wouldn’t be here without them, and so many other secondary and
tertiary industries here came about as the result of the mining industry. To
pretend otherwise would be silly. We’re reminded of that when we feel the earth
shake with a rock burst, or when we lose a miner in a slide. If you forget
where you’re from, you won’t really know who you are, I often think.
To be a writer in Northern Ontario is to feel somewhat
distanced from the heartbeat of what happens in literature across Canada, to
feel at a distance from the more lively, urban centres where there are a wealth
of reading series, presses, independent bookshops, and writing circles. To
venture out to read poetry in other cities—bigger places—is often to return
home and then feel that you are still on the margins of a literary community.
To combat this, as a writer, I follow other Canadian writers on social media. I
read widely. I try to meet writers from ‘away,’ as it were. I also actively
seek out new poetry books to review. Writing poetry book reviews makes me aware
of the many poets who are writing in Canada today, but it also makes me feel
part of a wider, more connected community of poets. I have some poet friends
here in Sudbury, and across the Northeast, but I’d like to feel woven into a
larger network of Canadian and international writers. We have, I think, so much
to learn from one another, if we can learn to listen carefully.
I was thinking the other day, though, about what the
benefits are—of being ‘outside of’ urban centres. Before the COVID-19 virus arrived,
I found literary Twitter divisive and more than a bit overwhelming at times.
Now that people are having to stay home because of the circumstances—and now
that we’re facing something together as human beings—it seems to have become a
more tolerant place. In a place like Northern Ontario—where towns like Sudbury,
Timmins, Kagawong, North Bay, and Sault Ste. Marie are so spread out—being present
and mindful on the Internet allows me to gather a creative community of
like-minded artistic and socially active souls. I suppose I’ve been thinking,
too, that I need to take the good and jettison the bad. Living up here means
that I can focus on my writing, and not get too caught up or overwhelmed by
social media posturing, or the literary politics that seem to flourish in
bigger urban centres.
Now, in the times of self-isolation because of the
COVID-19 virus, I find we’re all learning more about distances, about the
surreal spaces we find ourselves in, and how we need to connect on social
media. While we’re separated physically—whether by this country’s vast
landscape, or by a self-imposed isolation or quarantine that’s meant to help us
take care of one another—writers and artists do seem to be able to connect with
one another in magical and innovative sorts of ways. We are used to working
with creative energy, and maybe that’s how we know we can create ways to
cultivate and support the arts and culture sector in Canada during this
difficult time. We mind one another. We buy one another’s books, and we
go to one another’s plays and concerts. We applaud and celebrate our creations.
We gather around a creative, communal fire.
I think, to be honest, this sense of supporting one
another will be the most important thing for all of us after the pandemic has
swept across Canada. I think that the arts community, and the literary
community in particular, will have the potential to be the heart of whatever new
society emerges. I know it sounds idealistic, but what people will have begun
to perhaps realize is that—in times of fear and uncertainty—they turn even more
eagerly to visual art, music, books, films, and storytellers as if turning
themselves towards the warmth of a campfire. The arts sector creates community.
We’ve seen that in recent days and weeks. It may be the most important thing
that sustains us while we worry about what’s going on now, and while we move
forward as human beings both during and after COVID19’s been here.
A Toronto poet said to me, a few years ago, “You
really should’ve moved south when you were younger. That was a mistake, staying
up north.” No, I don’t think so. I had to go away for a year to figure that
out. For me, this place, with its rough and beautiful landscape of rocks, tall
pines, and blue water—so populated with bears and foxes and crows and ravens—is
where I’m meant to write. It’s informed my poetic and literary sensibility, and
it’s somehow taught me to be quiet inside, and how to listen much more
carefully before I speak. That might come from being out in the bush so often,
either snowshoeing or hiking, or from swimming in the dawn August rain and mist
out on Long Lake, but I’ll never be completely sure of how or why that happens.
I’m on the margins, and I’ve finally figured out that I’m okay with that.
Kim Fahner lives and writes
in Sudbury, Ontario. She was poet laureate in Sudbury from 2016-18, and was the
first woman appointed to the role. Kim's latest book of poems is These Wings
(Pedlar Press, 2019). She's a member of the League of Canadian Poets, the
Writers' Union of Canada, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of
Canada. Kim blogs fairly regularly at kimfahner.wordpress.com and can be
reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com
