Kathy Fisher : “Introducing Lady Refinery and her Turnaround Team”

 folio : energy stories

 

 

from Prairie Wheel: A Vision of Turnaround

Give me this day your life, your LABOR, and I’ll give you back one day, then another.

For mine are the terms.                                                   –Anne Winters 

She masks herself in the glare of the midday sun.
They say she is 29.
Births?
Depends on when you start counting.

                                      Could be the year

ground is broken by a rusty-bladed spade        or
when first concrete is poured    or
maybe when the last bolt is tightened
and the whole refinery fired up. 

It’s their secret. And who is she to argue.

What’s certain is
she was built on fertile flat farmland
                               a whistle stop.

This big-boned girl from Northern Alberta.

          Bewitched by bitumen.

          Gorged on gas.
          Secrets stored in oil
tanks
furnaces.
          Not that she isn’t known
intimately
in bits and pieces.

                               Tens

of skilled workers know
          every part of
          some part of her
by number.            
                               Hundreds serve
every                       four years     run a
                               45 day
marathon.  

          The repairs and maintenance

                                 mosaic
                                                   take the call
                                                            appear
                                                         this year  
September 
fall.  

They turn up

        gear up
                                                   STOP PURGE REPAIR REPLACE RESTART
                                                                         

              tribal     

     strict ritual   
tight schedule    
                                                   We wake up in the dream        

          weather  

         together  

                                                              the shutdown

                                                              turnaround
                                                              team

 

 

 

Kathy Fisher [photo credit: Louise Abbott] is an Edmonton-based, Montreal-born, Lake Memphremagog and Grand Lake-raised multidisciplinary artist, performance poet and documentarian who creates with keen attention to the ear and eye. For over 30 years she has worked as a storyteller, researcher and oral historian, recording audio and video interviews with female elders and top lawyers, judges and law librarians. A host in the local literary and spoken word scene, Fisher regularly produces multi-disciplinary evenings of words and music, often with visual arts components. Her video poem think of me naked was produced by and aired on CBC TV, and her first poetry CD received airplay on CKUA, CJSR, CKXU and CBC. Fisher’s poems have been published nationally in traditional and online literary journals. She has appeared on stages across North America, in Mexico and France, in bars, theatres and festivals. A keen collaborator, Fisher regularly performs spoken word and song with a roster of musicians, often as part of “lyric fusion” duos or trios. Recent projects include collaborative video-poems/poetry-videos and portrait/poetry collaborations. Current projects include refining her poetry manuscript, below the belt and developing her video-poem on the Spanish flu, traveller.

In 2013, Fisher was one of 10 artists commissioned by Shell to create art in Art ReFined. Inspired by “turnaround,” a 45-day, highly planned process where Shell’s Fort Saskatchewan refinery was shut down, cleaned, repaired, tended, Fisher gave voice to the Refinery herself in her chapbook prairie wheel and in her poetry installation at the Art Gallery of Alberta.